This rekindled an observation I had in the never-to-be-solved arena of courting, marriage and men and women. And that observation is despite being villianized, degraded and shamed, activities that were traditionally considered “woman’s work” were and still are vitally important to the family and society. Ergo, why were they villianized in the first place?
Guessing: His theory could be that the introduction of the birth control pill (60’s) had a huge impact on ‘family’?
Destroying the basic family unit at the core would and has created a need for more government intervention. The need for more government facilitates higher taxes which sustains those advocating for more government spending.
I believe Kate has previously provided links to ex KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov that provide hints.
feminists
While this article hints that we may be making progress in downsizing the snivel service the battle is clearly far from over.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Public+service+sees+biggest+staffing+squeeze+since+1990s/4034267/story.html
Oops…that was meant for readers tips.
syncodox is clearly aware of this, but for some others here is the series referred to with Yuri Bezmenov,
it starts here, the entire series is worth saving and watching at your leisure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_xdBnFPqOI
“…why were they villianized in the first place?”
Because if there’s no money associated with the work, you can’t TAX it?
And because its hard to unionize family members doing housework for free.
Because all those Forties movies with Cary Grant/Jimmy Stewart in the frilly apron doing the dishes made Grandma really want a man in a frilly apron of her own?
Because of the COMMIES? (I actually find that one the most reasonable, enemy action goes a long way toward explaining the insanity.)
Or my last, feeble guess: With certain prominent exceptions, most chicks are stupid and lazy?
In my opinion, what appears to be a consensus on the Captain’s blog of the left trivializing “woman’s work” is true.
During the 1920s, one of the major efforts to gain control over the hearts and minds of the Russian people by the Soviets was to destabilize the family. In part they did this by establishing day-care, making a divorce easy to get, undermining the moral and religious underpinnings of marriage and creating an economic environment which forced woman to join the workforce.
It was all part of the effort to create a new Soviet man and woman.
Sources to back this up theory are innumerable. Read anything regarding Russia by Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes and others.
This wonderfully nostalgic view of the family pact meant that the guys were supposed to do their bit. IF the fellow was abusive, was not a good provider, the stay-at-home woman and the kids were likely in pretty bad shape and had very few options. Woman’s work was only thought of in negative terms because it did not confer economic benefits and power into the hands of the women. Sure if they did the equivalent of “clipping coupons” the family unit benefited economically but if the dad was a deadbeat, drank or ran around, none of that financial benefit went to the family. Also, if the man become sick or disabled, there was little chance that the wife could support the family because society was not structured to employ women in paid work except in a few circumstances.
The notion of the original feminist movement having been inspired by marxist plants with the intention of damaging the family is pretty ludicrous. It’s backwards reasoning and shows absolutely no insight in the history and development of this movement.
I think as the lot of women improved, there were many who had jumped on the bandwagon, who no longer had any purpose and had too little to do. So they hunted around for other reasons to be involved and to be annoyed about. Just like the original environmental groups (which I admired) slouched towards the Bethlehem of climate change, the women’s groups troped their way towards all sorts of dubious activism and grotesque distortions of the original goals.
I consider myself a feminist–but in my version of it, everyone pitches in to support each other. The jobs are shared in the way that best suits those involved. I admire men and their special capabilities, just as I admire women and theirs. I have no time for snivelling victims of any stripe, or gender bashing of any flavor.
Ken:
You beat me to it. That’s right, “empowering” women by getting them out and into the workforce was a big part of the Bolshevik plan to re-engineer role of women in society…especially with regards to the family.
Soviet Russia was one of the first (if not the first) to celebrate International Women’s Day in its present form. And, even today, the “March 8th” celebration is basically a three-day drunk fest in the former Soviet states.
Villianize? Is there such a word? My spellcheck doesn’t think so.
Bingo, CC!
The official female-supremacy-not-equality, feminists devalued “woman’s work” to fuel their agenda — economic power for women, which they considered, along with abortion, to be the lynch pin of equality — and our left-lib governments who saw only dollar $ign$, via taxation, of women working outside the home.
What they left out of this “women’s equality” (sic) equation was the detrimental effects women’s working outside the home, en masse, and being away from the family domicile for 8-10 hours/day, would have on the family and the community at large. (Who’s going to monitor the kids after school, who’s going to do the volunteer work? Feminists didn’t like women volunteering, as women were supposed to make money in order to empower themselves. As per usual, this adult-centric agenda, left out the consequences for the kids.)
Children don’t bring themselves up and daycares are a poor substitute for having one’s mom or dad provide care in the home.
In order to initiate a Leftist/Communist/Socialist agenda, it’s imperative to destroy the pillars of society: the Church and the nuclear, mom/dad/kids family. ‘Get rid of them, and you’ve got carte blanche to reshape society in whatever way you wish.
So, in the ’60s, moms left their homes en masse to work for money and entrusted the care of their kids to nannies and daycare workers. Have our kids, has society, benefited from this model? Just who has been empowered by this arrangement?
Just an aside: Captain Capitalism, your white on black lettering seemed to be dancing the whole time I was reading it! It’s hard on the eyes. ‘Any chance of settling your dancing words down? 😉
heh – I’m not into conspiracy theories. I’ll have to stick with demographics. That’s my answer to the question of the changing role of women and the family in the 20-21st centuries.
Long ago, there was no nuclear family, i.e., two parents functioning as the basic economic unit. This mode developed in Europe in the 16th c and after, ..a period of enormous population increase.
Before that, humans lived within extended families and clans which functioned as economic and nurturance units. Sort of like our modern welfare state…but of course, much more efficient, less costly and corrupt. The point was, the whole ‘set’ operated as an economic unit to nuture all its members.
Problem? This economic and societal mode is static. Its focus is on group stability. It inhibits individualism, deviation from the Set’s norms of belief and behaviour. It has to do that or it falls apart. AND, interesting..but it has a critical threshold of population content. It can’t maintain this ‘economic unit’ as a coherent Set if its population increases too much.
And that is what happened. The massive population increases in Europe..and the necessity for individualism, free thought, inventions of new technology and agricultural methods and medicine to deal with supporting the higher populations. The extended family unit was no longer functional.
The nuclear family developed. This was a highly mobile unit, able to move from the rural to the town, and from town to town. Such mobility was unheard of in previous decades/centuries. Able to work in factories…The man worked, the woman kept the home and children and could not work outside because there was No Extended Family.
This was the basic family economic unit that enabled the technological and intellectual rise of the West – and its expansion to N. America and the USA.
But – with technological development and further population increases, the economic requirement for the woman to do the household economic work disappeared.
And, the two world wars removed the men from the workplace – and women moved in.
Now, two salaries are usually required to maintain a household! And, the economic cost of support for this household is very expensive – in taxes as well as private funds (daycare, medical, food, schools..etc.)
So, it’s all about demographics. Not global warming.
I don’t know the why but I know the how. During the mid-70’s and 80’s education took a slip. Because women were not going into the sciences (male dominated) they eased the requirements. Entry was easier, classes were easier and a job at the other end was almost a sure thing. As a result there were lots of young females that surpassed their husbands income where I worked. This seemed to produce stress as I routinely heard them on the phone telling the husband what to do with the kids in loud angry voices.
They were stressed. The kids were problems, the husbands felt unsure of their roles and they were overwhelmed by the job. EAP programs were a growth industry.
ET.
Do you see the communists/socialism having played any role in the demise of “the family” as major placeholder in our society? As though it was in their plan, to have people more dependent on the state, and less on the family?
Oh – and one other thing to my long explanation of the current devaluation of women-in-the-house. If we consider that the woman-in-the-house developed with the rise of the nuclear family that enabled the rise of modern industrial development…both of which were REQUIRED because of the massive population increases of the 16th and later centuries….then…
What is happening now is the disappearance of that vital nuclear family. And the disappearance of the role of the woman as one notch in this nuclear family. Why is the nuclear family disappearing? I’m not sure, but I suspect it has, yet again, something to do with demographics. The population has reached yet another critical threshold that moves beyond the capacity of nuclear family organization.
This then sets up more questions. What/who raises the children? The society or group.
Does this new societal-family (rather than nuclear family)inhibit or enable intellectual freedom and innovation? Answer: I’m not sure.
Does it provide more societal stability? Actually, no. We seem to be moving into ‘groupism’ or ethnic/regional/class isolate communities, each fighting with each other.
Then, there’s the role of electronic ‘touch’ in our modern world, where we are in touch with others, instantly and always, all over the world. This removal of spatial restrictions in our world has an enormous implication but I’m not sure yet how that affects the role of the family, nuclear or societal, in raising the next generation.
ET: “Now, two salaries are usually required to maintain a household!”
And that’s largely because our governments have mandated this to their benefit, via taxation of both parents.
Is it absolutely necessary that there be two salaries in a family? Definitely “yes” if you want to live the North American lifestyle we see on TV: own your own house, drive two cars, holiday at your cottage or another place of your choosing, wear new, not hand-me-down, designer clothing, entertain yourself to death, take “Freedom-55,” etc.
If, however, you choose to live counter-culturally (as my family has in order for mom — me — to stay home with the kids, and I might add, a whole lot of other people’s kids, mostly single moms’ kids for no remuneration) it’s not easy but it has its rewards. (My husband and I don’t own a home, we have one car, and we’re looking at Freedom-85.) One-income families with one parent home to care for their children, however, were systemically and systematically penalized through taxation when I stayed home with my children in the ’80s. The NAC/SOW feminists had an iron grip on the Trudeau/Mulroney/Chretien/Martin governments and if you stayed home with your kids you were considered a traitor to the feminist cause: chattel to your husband, slave to the home, and, therefore, undeveloped and unfulfilled. Ha!
I would be interested, ET, in your answer to this question, “what effect does the two-income family have on our children and society at large?”
Also, though I was fascinated and very interested in your sociological reasoning for the rise of the nuclear family in the 16th century, where do you see the Church fitting in, because the Church had a huge effect on family and community life until very recently, actually.
This bizarre idea that women were all doe-eyed, mitten-knitting cookie bakers up until about fifty years ago is damaging to the mind of anyone wishing to marry a woman with the demeanor and abilities of a grandmother but with a body sixty years younger. These swarms of joyous housewives never existed — rather, swarms of women who COULD do the work existed. Women who hated cooking and sewing did it anyway. The same percentage who loathed domesticity is the same percentage of women who still hate it. People have not changed one iota for those years. Technology has changed!
The women who hated their work still hate their work, but now they simply don’t have to do it because of things like washing machines. Now there are enough choices to allow women to reject the path that they hate (the same path they would have hated no matter what century).
Woman’s work is shamed by those who assume that every other woman hates bringing their guy coffee in bed, too.
marc in calgary – no, I don’t see ‘the communists’ as agential in this demise of the nuclear family.
That is, I consider that the world had a demographic and economic problem which were expressed in the two world wars. The problem was a creaking, tectonic imbalance in industrial and economic capacities in different parts of the world – and a tectonic imbalance in the political infrastructures that ruled these areas.
You MUST have inequality and imbalance, otherwise nothing happens (global bowl of jello). But it can’t be too extreme – as it is now, with the Middle East out of sync with the rest of the world’s economic and political modes of operation. Same thing in the 19th and 20th c..with Russia, Japan, and parts of old Europe.
Russia and China (and Japan) were dealing with the fact that their populations had outstripped the carrying capacities of their peasant agricultural system. Instead of moving into capitalism (the nuclear family and private entrepreneurship) the first two attempted top-down societal and economic change to force the population into an industrial urban economy. They had to break up the old EXTENDED families and peasant economies to do this. Result? Massive loss of population – and industrialization – but they must now move into capitalism and some form of nuclear family.
As for the ideology of communism and socialism, we will always have that with us. Why? Because it is emotionally soothing. The individual is not responsible. Something Higher is responsible. No more doubt. No more fears of ‘what will happen if I can’t…’. So, intellectually there will always be ‘leftists’ around to argue for less individual responsibility and more societal nurturance.
But I tend to consider that ideologies emerge and become dominant not just by words alone (that academic hotly debating whatever)..but within the more basic and deeper demographic and economic structures.
safety forced – there were/are a lot of women who took and take great pride in ‘women’s work’ – whether it be in cooking, baking, making preserves, cleaning, sewing, knitting. Your view that such work was hated is, I suggest, invalid.
And I suggest that your view that a washing machine frees women-from-hate is naive. Consider the financial requirement to make and purchase and maintain that washing machine. It could mean a woman working at a job right now that she hates – whether as a cashier, working within a bakery, working within a dry cleaners, working within a factory or as an accountant…
There are a lot of men who equally hate their work, then and now.
batb – I differentiate between the church, which developed as a political and economic institution from the 4th through 16th centuries – and the Christian religion, which was focused around the individual. I don’t know if you make this distinction, but since I do – it is hard to answer your question.
I actually think the issue goes deeper than what’s been discussed, notwithstanding my attempt at being amusing above.
Western society has a -profound- double standard between men and women, the femmies no less than hidebound “right wingers. The details vary, but Left or Right, girlies get a Special Deal.
Why is that?
I think the reason is women’s death in childbirth and infant mortality. Forever and ever, something like 5%-10% of births killed the mother, and infant mortality ran around 10++%. Women had to be protected as well, because they are -smaller- and can’t swing a bat the way the boys can. That was the standard, world wide, rich or poor.
Some things came along in the last couple hundred years and changed all that. First and most profound was the Germ Theory of Disease, which gave the Western world tools to prevent sicknesses like child bed fever. Public sanitation stopped all manner of bacterial plagues.
Then Sam Colt invented the revolver, and put women on the same plane as men so far as violence goes. (All you gun haters want to think about that one just a little bit, eh?)
More recently we have had anesthetic, the Ceaserian Section technique and antibiotics.
Thanks to all that, suddenly women don’t need a man around 24/7/365 to keep them and their kids alive. Suddenly, pregnancy is not a potentially fatal condition.
Electric motors and power tools make women almost as capable as men in manufacturing. No more pick and shovel, no more plane and chisel. Now its backhoe, table saw.
We are still coming to terms with all that. Communists did indeed take over the Ivory Tower and did indeed do their level best to ruin the family unit, but they could never have got a foot in were it not for these structural changes.
As mentioned above, the cherry on top was birth control pills. Now there’s zero penalty for girls being the biggest sluts in human history, and again they are now on equal footing with the boys.
As a result of all this, we have some uproar in this present generation of kids. Commies rode its coat tails, is all.
Men have had beaten into them over the centuries the concepts of chivalry and personal honor. Women were the beneficiaries of that, it was designed to keep them alive because they were precious. As in valuable, irreplaceable assets.
Women however do -not- have personal honor as vital component of their identity. Guys have to prove themselves with a variety of manhood/honor kinda tests, but for the girls a healthy rack and a winning smile will get then in almost anywhere.
This is not to say women generally are not honorable, just that at present they are not judged -by society- in that way, as men are.
Which of course shows up like a problem in formerly male domains like business or medicine. Males are in fact fleeing the medical profession en mass because its flat-out dangerous to be a dude working in a hospital these days. Women think nothing of filing harassment charges on the slightest pretext, whereas in the old days the guys would have settled things with a couple of harsh words in the elevator. (Note however that women rarely file charges against -other women-. Harsh words in the elevator?)
I expect this will all even out in the next hundred years or so, as society gets used to women not dying on us at the drop of a hat. Women just have to grow into the new responsibilities that came along with all their new found freedoms. Takes a while.
In this regard I view the current craze for “princess” stuff among little girls as a positive sign. Princesses are revered for their noble behavior, moral strength and good manners as much as their beauty.
Is that sound I hear some feminazi grinding her teeth? Why, I think it might be! 🙂
We need to factor in women’s love for their husbands and children in the woman-as-primary-care-giver scenario, plus the fact that, until rather recently, there were no central heating or bottles and formula with which to feed the children. Someone had to stay home to feed the kids and keep the home fires burning, and seeing as dad didn’t have the breasts full of milk but did have the brawn to do the physical work necessary to keep the farm or factory running, women in the home was natural and handy for survival.
This meme that women have been downtrodden by sticking to hearth and home is, essentially, hogwash. Would you rather, say, if you lived in Cape Breton in the last century, be a man down the mine or his wife taking care of the children and hanging her wash out on a sunny, breezy day with a view of the harbour?
Men haven’t exactly had it easy over the centuries — but when men and women form a partnership via marriage-for-life (something the Church has always encouraged and supported), division of labour just makes sense and doesn’t mean that one is dominant over the other, just because one of them has earning power. My husband and I have always shared everything and have a joint bank account. In our Christian marriage, what’s his is mine and what’s mine is his (excepting underwear and socks!) — and we share it all with our children. (This arrangement has worked for 32 years.)
Because the nuclear family is such a strong unit — because we all rely so much on each other and, therefore, have a strong loyalty to one another and our independence — governments that want to control everything because they know better than we do, will do anything to destroy it. Since the ’60s, when political impulses have been to move to the Left, there has been an agenda to weaken the nuclear family: Let the state bring up the kids because they know best (with the underlying agenda of getting mothers, en masse, into the workplace to make money for bigger and more intrusive government and for big industry).
Interestingly, as we see political impulses moving more towards the Right these days, increasing numbers of women are making the decision to stay home with their child(ren). The CPC government’s policy of returning money to families, via their $100/child-six-and-under/month, to make their own childcare choices (rather than pumping tax dollars into a publicly funded national daycare program) is a step in the right/correct, direction, IMO.
I see ET has returned. Yay! 🙂
Which came first Ma’am? Population increase or technology improvement? Chicken or egg?
batb brings up an important, unsung technological breakthrough in human life: baby formula. I bet you can see a major kink in the infant mortality graph when formula became widely available.
Thanks ET, Phantom, batb. good stuff.
do I take it then that the captain views WW II as a communist plot to further their cause of demolishing the family because , well, Rosie the Riveter was very butch eh?
right wing thinking requires a lot of twists and turns sometimes. when do you start to shoot those not totally lock step?
ET –
of course women still love doing domestic work. I love it! But I have female friends who gripe about the lack of good men when they can’t even hold up their end of the bargain by learning to be a good woman. They detest the work involved and don’t think it’s fair that they have to learn the trick to folding fitted sheets. The washing machine example is a nod to this (http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/posted/archive/2009/03/09/vatican-celebrate-women-s-rights-washing-machines-vs-abortion-rights.aspx). Washing machines do not free women from hate, but washing machines erase hours of difficult work from a woman’s day.
Lots of people hate what they do, but they do it out of necessity and as mentioned by another poster, out of selfless love for their family.
I notice that the Phantom is listing several technological — not societal or personal — advances that have thrown a major wrench into the old order. Technology has ushered out the house and home of the Ye Olden Days. Turning back the clock to subsistence levels would reset duties (because it’s just plain natural for women to stay home with the kids — technology lets us choose even if the best choice is to stay domestic)
batb, I come from the exact stock that you mention of CB Island. But those relatives were the ones having 14 children. I’m sure that counts for some comparison against working the farm, mines and fishery depending on the time of year.
People will make the same choices (good and bad) that they always did, but the expansive technology we have allows us to make even bigger mistakes than ever before.
To add to ET’s excellent analysis on demographics dictating the demise of the extended family we have now the warehousing of our parents as they age into senior’s residences or assisted living facilities. Whereas in earlier times and today in other cultures these grandparents were and are vital sources of no-cost support for the harried housewife.
It seems strange to see our huge homes with almost nobody in them until now with the huge cost of home purchase and maintenance our children are returning to the family nest as my son has and perhaps this will be the start of the extended family again.
Interesting about “women’s work” as my sister and her daughter and several female friends don’t cook at all and their husbands do it, enjoy it and are excellent at it.
Hopefully as we are seeing with Ford in Toronto and heavily in the US the shrinking of the public employees, which is where all the taxes of the wife working has gone IMHO, will reverse our declining economic picture.
phantom – population increase came first, long before technological or societal change. Why?
Because humans resist change; they will fight to retain their old ideologies and technologies. Even moving from feudalism (tribalism) to a civic political mode will be difficult and involve enormous resistance, both physical and intellectual.
What happened in Europe was a constant population increase ..for one reason. The ecological nature of W. Europe is the richest on this planet. People generally tend to utterly ignore biomes or ecology. They think that life is ‘the same’ everywhere. No, it isn’t – and the geographic and biological nature of your envt is crucial.
Is there enough water for a large population, or is it only from rivers that dry up seasonally? No rain or too much rain? Is the climate too cold for long term crops? Too hot and humid for hooved animals? Are there even animals to domesticate…and there were/are few in most of Africa – which explains its economic ‘backwardness’. But Europe had it all. The richest soil on the planet; regular mild rainfall. Lots of animals and plants to domesticate. Temperate climate.
That led to population increases. BUT with the old technology (oxen/horses and plough), small scale peasant or local food production)..this couldn’t maintain the population. Led to poor nutrition and then, famines and diseases, which would reduce the population. It would then climb again.
Next, you try wars where you try to get more resources from your neighbour. Population decrease and not much better nutrition.
The last thing a people will do is change their way of life. It took the West over 400 very bloody and vicious years to do this – during which the Old Guard of the feudal infrastructure and the political church..fought against the New Way, which was about the freedom of the individual to think and develop new technology.
Now, two salaries are usually required to maintain a household! And, the economic cost of support for this household is very expensive – in taxes as well as private funds (daycare, medical, food, schools..etc.)
~ET
Two salaries are required to maintain a household today because the massive influx of women into the workforce in the 1970s caused a glut of labour and wage increases became static.
The ’70s-early’80s were marked by stagflation.
During this period wages were stagnant in the private sector and the period was marked by strikes in the unionized public sector which increased taxation to pay for massive benefit increases to public unions.
Well you see when you move from an agricultural based to an industrial based some labour just becomes boring. Where once women’s work consisted of raising children, cleaning house, looking after husband, tending the chickens, garden, milking cows and or goats, feeding pigs etc etc etc on a farm when transposed into a city the work load became infinitely more boring and repetitive when modern technology is used. Where once laundry would take all of Monday to complete suddenly it could be done every evening during commercials on TV. Where once a meal took hours to prepare now it is ready in a matter of minutes. Where once the Mom took her children with her on her tasks and taught them as they went now they go to school. Then when you add in the ‘freedom’ from childbirth afforded by the pill… On top of that you have the pressure of the market to have the latest and greatest and here is a loan to help you get it. The surprising thing is that any woman would want to stay home and raise kids.
Oz – I don’t think that the insertion of women into the paid workforce has anything to do with the high cost of living and the current necessity for a two-income family.
Remove the gender attribute (male/female) from your variable of: paid workforce. Just consider them as all: paid workers. Then, consider why the society’s workforce increased so much. What else was going on?
First, massive increase in population due to lowering of both birth mortalities, lowering death rates, disease control, better nutrition etc. So you’ve got an increased population to support. Canada, for example, moved from 11 million in 1945 to 33 million now.
Second, increasing urbanization and mass production of foods; and, increasing technological capacity to ‘make machines do work’.
All of this requires an increased labour force. Machines don’t replace human labour. Not one bit -machines divert it to other work areas.
So – instead of one man and one horse plough – you have factory workers making the Deere ploughs and combines and front-end loaders and tractors and processing the oil and building the roads and….
And the bookkeepers and record keepers and delivery and…
When you double the supply of a commodity in the market place the value becomes halved.
Simple economics, believe what you want, it’s irrelevant.
oz – so you are saying that if a farmer doubles his crop of tomatoes (the supply(), then, he must reduce his sale price by half?
Doesn’t it cost him more to produce double his crop? And isn’t his goal to make a profit?
If a manufacturer doubles his production capacity of X-phone, does this mean that he must then sell this phone for half what it was before?
Doesn’t it cost him more to produce those phones?
And – if a larger production output does manage to save costs, should all these savings be passed to the consumer? Wouldn’t the manufacturer want to increase profits -and then, he can invest those profits in other industries?
If that manufacturer doubled his output, would the govt insist that its tax-take on those products remain the same as before? That is, would the govt reduce the capital taxes on the manufacturer even though he was producing twice the goods?
oz – so you are saying that if a farmer doubles his crop of tomatoes (the supply(), then, he must reduce his sale price by half?
~et
No.
Bad analogy and misses the point that they entire labour force was quickly doubled, permanently.
I’m saying that if ALL of the tomatoe farmers double their crop yield for the foreseeable future the price they will be get for their tomatoe crops as individual farmers will either become halved or remain static until a few years later the price they get for their tomatoes will be only half of what they used to get in real inflation adjusted dollars.(within the same market without shipping them to new markets-labour markets aren’t as transportable as tomatoes)
One farmer doubling his individual crop just one year doesn’t cause a permanent glut of tomatoes in the market place.
Thank you ET, batb, Phantom and others that have made this a very interesting thread.
ET’s comments @ 10:26 and 11:40 brought to mind some anecdotal family history.
My ancestor, a village shoemaker in the Gdansk (Danzig) area of Poland in the late 1700s, found that competition with the emerging factory shoe manufacturers was squeezing out his business, so he relocated to the Black Sea area in 1789 and became a farmer. His 4th generation descendants, also farmers, during the 1920s, were caught up in Lenin’s war on religion and Stalin’s war on independent farmers.
My wife’s family’s story is identical except for the fact that her ancestor was a spinning wheel maker who could not compete with factory made spinning wheels.
Fascinating thread.
Rita @ 9:27AM
Very well said, thank you.
Some other points; all we are talking about here is only true for what, five, or at best ten percent of the global population?
And why is ‘feminism’ by and large silent on misogynism rife in imperialistic theofascism?
And what about the societal suicide of taxing the productive non-civil service middle class out of procreation? Their gold plated job security and pensions are exploitation on the backs of the not as lucky middle class.
This arguably feminist economic structure resulting missing-children cohort is then necessarily replaced with people and attitudes from paternalistic societies from the other 90% of global population. It must be done to keep the economic house of cards from toppling.
How does feminism deal with these issues? Mostly by pretending they do not exist. If cornered, through obfuscation by spurious moral equivalency arguments.
If a manufacturer doubles his production capacity of X-phone, does this mean that he must then sell this phone for half what it was before?~et
This misses the point.
The point is a permanent glut, not the doubling of the capacity of a single producer that can halve production any time he wants to keep prices up.
The concept of economy of scale kicks in and the producer’s cost of production goes down.
Does the cost of the X-phone drop as the market becomes glutted with the X-Phone?
Yes.
PS3 platforms are selling for half of what they used to sell for just 3 years ago, despite SONY having quadrupled the size of the HDDs of each unit to entice sales.
I could give you a plethora of examples.
Your analogies are bad because you missed the point of a permanent glut of labour/a commodity.
Bringing in large numbers of immigrants while birth rates have fallen among the legacy Canadian population keeps the labour glut in place and wages depressed, particularly wages for unskilled labour.
Taken as a whole, the human resource labour market doubled during the ’70s and ’80s because women left the home in droves during that period and took up permanent careers, in most individual cases, creating a new economy with wage stagflation.
oz – you are missing the point. I am not talking about a ‘single farmer’ or ‘single manufacturer’ and you are bringing these up as red herrings.
My point is that YOU said that doubling production results in lowering prices by half. I maintain that this pendulum is not the case.
After all, if the population increases, then the demand increases. If the farmer/manufacturer can increase his production line, without an extensive increase in his costs (because the land has been bought, the tractors bought, the new technology developed)…then he can sell his product for less than it was in the early stages. This has nothing to do with merely doubling production; it’s all about the costs of production.
AND – if he has more customers, then, he can get the same or a larger profit – because his costs of set-up have already been dealt with.
You are setting up a situation where the consumer-population remains the same size. But it never does; that’s the whole point of an industrial market economy.
If unskilled labour is needed, then what’s wrong with that? Why should they receive the same wages as skilled? There will always be a need for unskilled or low-skilled labour – and all immigrants go through this phase in their early generations. It’s only the few who come to ‘the new land’ with full industrial skills.
I disagree with your opinion that wages have stagnated because women moved into the work force.
You are essentially saying that: wages have stagnated. That is indeed the case. But your reasons are; ‘glut in the labour market’ caused by the influx of women (and immigrants). I think you are ignoring several other economic factors.
Industrialism is not a no-growth but a growth economy. It must expand its markets. That’s because industrialism is based on private enterprise and a competitive market. That means that someone is always coming up with a new technology, a new consumer product, a new restaurant, phone, shoe, car….
This requires investment. Investment rests on profits. Profits rest on growth of consumption.
Industrial populations cannot remain static in size or mentality. Only no-growth, non-industrial populations are static. That’s why Russia and China are in trouble because they are having trouble moving their peasant populations off the no-growth, non-market economy.
In the ‘new world’, immigration is an absolute necessity to ‘fire up’ the industrial economy – both as workers and as consumers. Nations without this worker/consumer population are in economic trouble. Witness Europe – where half the population are non-productive as workers and do not contribute to the requirement for profit/surplus (required for investment).
What we are seeing in wage stagnation in the private sector and wage increases in the public sector. This is something to be worried about – the growth of the public economy vs the private economy. The former RESTS within the latter…and thus, the former is parasitic on the latter. This is the real problem.
What we are also seeing is that wages are becoming trivial in this public sector, for much of the economic well-being of the public sector rests within their benefits and pensions. These are not taxed…and far outweigh value of their salaries. All those meals, cars, travel costs, hotels, dental, medical..and all those computers, phones and etc..all paid for by the Public Purse. Think about that.
Again, I don’t feel convinced by your opinion that the problem is the influx of women into the labour force.
My point is that YOU said that doubling production results in lowering prices by half.
~et
Not at all.
I didn’t say that doubling production results in lowering prices by half when demand remains the same.
I said that doubling the quantity of a commodity in the market place results in lowering the prices by half.
After all, if the population increases, then the demand increases.
~et
No, women who were already part of the household economy didn’t increase demand in the economy as a whole.
Demand doesn’t follow production or increase in quantity of a commodity.
Production quantity should follow demand, not the reverse.
When employers found that for every job they needed filled twice as many applicants were available, wage increases were no longer necessary to maintain their labour pool.
If quantity outstrips demand, as it did in the labour market, then wages/prices remain static or fall.
Wages remaining static leads to a real loss of buying power if the prices of goods and services rises by an outside force, taxes for instance.
That is what happened in the ’70s and ’80s.
Yes, more women had buying power because they had jobs, but unemployment for men skyrocketed(resulting in the phenomenom of a large population of homeless men which still exists today but didn’t exist before so many women glutted the labour market) and household buying power fell during that era resulting in the need for a permanent 2 paycheck family where once the husband’s paycheck was enough to buy a home, car, refrigerator/stove, TV/stereo, and washer/dryer.
It was the glut of labour caused by masses of women entering the labour market during that era that is responsible for the loss of wage increases overall that has led to the permanent 2 paycheck household.
Destabilise the home, destabilise society.
While taking English literature courses (yes, I did), we discussed how a medieval wife ran the home. It was like running a factory. There was purchasing foodstuffs, preparation, storage, organising the help, paying the help’s wages (if at all), cleaning, child-raising. The modern housewife’s role is not too different. Why the useless, childless feminists deliberately wished to lack this important insight is beyond me.
oz – I guess I’m dim but I still don’t get your conclusion that the ‘glut of labour because of women entering the market place lowered wage increases’.
I certainly agree with the stasis in wage increases but I claim that this is because a two-tiered employment structure has been set up; that of the private sector which sees no increases – and that of the public sector whose numbers are massive – and who see not only massive wage increases, but receive pensions and benefits that are wildly out of line with the private sector. And yet, the private sector pays for these public benefits!
I don’t agree with you that, because of the existence of women in the labour force, there are more applicants than job positions and thus – no wage increases. We could equally say that the surplus of workers is due to the removal of age restrictions, disability restrictions, work-at-home, the growth of contract vs full-time work, immigration.
We could also say that the growth of the college and university industry has resulted in the removal of a significant proportion of the population from the work force. Just imagine if the college and universities closed and released all those young people into the work force.
I wish someone else on this thread would intervene and help explain this debate between myself and oz.
I think, oz, that your reduction of causality of no wage increases to ONE attribute – women in the work force – is limited and insufficient.
First – my reference to population increase didn’t refer to women-in-the-labour force but referred to the natural growth of population and immigration increase.
Then, I don’t see that the insertion of women in the labour force led to an increase in homeless men. This has been a reality in all of the industrial era, and refers to both men and women.
Third, you are ignoring that the family is an economic unit as a whole. With the growth of home-technology, work-in-the-house was reduced. It didn’t take all of one day to do the laundry; you didn’t have to spend days preserving fruits and vegetables. BUT, the costs of this ‘home-care’ didn’t disappear. The costs of a washing machine, dryer, etc etc increased such that a one-income could no longer provide for these costs.
Now – in the public sector, quite frankly, a one-income would suffice. There is no real need for two incomes. But we have now set up an ideology where a woman who works in the home is denigrated. And the lifestyle of the ‘rich’ has now become the norm for a larger proportion of the population than it was before. ..whereas even 40 years ago, this was not the norm.
I don’t agree with you that, because of the existence of women in the labour force, there are more applicants than job positions and thus – no wage increases.”
~et
No.
Not ARE, WERE.
In the 1970s and early to mid 1980s when there WAS a huge influx of women embracing feminism into the job market and many wives divorced and left the home, husband, and children behind plus so many women, because feminists told them they had to have a career to be a modern women, went into the permanent job market.
Were there especially low unemployment figures at that time in the 1970s-1980s when most households at the end of the 1960s were one paycheck households that indicated that there was a need for the POOL/quantity of job seekers to double virtually overnight?
NO.
Did that influx/glut cause wage freezes?
Yes.
It’s history, look it up.
I lived through it.
The 2 paycheck family is now permanent because of it.
The introduction of Social Security did so much to change the family landscape. In my mother’s day, people in the family had designated roles. My mother was supposed to marry well. Her sister was told from a very early age,that she would stay home and take care of them in their old age. Your children were your retirement plan. She said, fear of old age and being left destitute was palpable back then. A friend of hers from school had her mother accompany her everywhere. I remember seeing in an old examination of conscience, not turning over your paycheck to your parents was considered a sin against honoring your father and mother. I believe after Social Security and other old age helps came in, the “need” for children greatly diminished. It freed an entire generations of children in ways that are hard to underestimate.
Today children feel that it is the parent’s job to support them, whatever money that the kid makes is theirs and parents should have zero say in any life decisions. Ask yourself if that is normal any where in the world that does not have somekind of old age pension program.
ET, nice comment!
You said: “Because humans resist change; they will fight to retain their old ideologies and technologies.”
I think that in primitive societies this is true. In ancient civil societies (Greece, Rome, Japan except under the Tokugawas, Moorish Spain), I think this was less the case. People were more open to innovation. Of course since the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution old technologies were abandoned whenever new ones proved more effective, in an ever increasing spiral.
You said: “What happened in Europe was a constant population increase ..for one reason. The ecological nature of W. Europe is the richest on this planet.” It is exceptional there, although I would put areas of China and India up there with Europe for richness. Those two places had immense civilizations which both fell to Europe… due to technology. The same technology I was talking about freeing women, interestingly.
Now, you made a global warming comment that got me thinking. If you look up Kate’s page now she’s got a nice big graph of temperatures. During the period we are talking about, Europe went from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age. In a very short period of time they went from Erick the Red farming in Greenland to Hans Brinker skating on the canals in Holland every winter.
I haven’t done the research, but I would hazard that population did not grow during the time of that temperature change because of the wonderful ecological conditions. If it grew, it did so because innovations made it possible to grow more food from less farmland, to store it better, and to move it better. And as I mentioned above, better understanding of disease allowed people with less food to get along better too.
Possibly there’s more of chicken than egg in technology? It’d be a giggle finding out, eh?
I remember years ago, back when I still watched TV, seeing Stephen Colbert (who has since disgraced himself beyond redemption) interviewing a feminist who’d published a book about how women need to earn money in any circumstance unless they want to be slaves (an eventuality of which she did not approve). Now Colbert is supposed to be a Catholic, which seems signifigant somehow; anyway, he asked the feminist writer (not verbatim) “so, if every woman just goes next door each morning to raise her neighbor’s kids, that’s good, right? ‘Cause she’s earning her own money?”
Even his audience laughed; it caught them unawares, and they didn’t have time to think about whether they were supposed to.
I remember years ago, back when I still watched TV, seeing Stephen Colbert – who has since disgraced himself beyond redemption: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjoLcCJav5Y&feature=related – interviewing a feminist who’d published a book about how women need to earn money in any circumstance unless they want to be slaves (an eventuality of which she did not approve). Now Colbert is supposed to be a Catholic, which seems signifigant somehow; anyway, he asked the feminist writer (not verbatim) “so, if every woman just goes next door each morning to raise her neighbor’s kids, that’s good, right? ‘Cause she’s earning her own money?”
Even his audience laughed; it caught them unawares.
It’s funny, I’ve been trying to get straightforward information on this topic, i.e. exactly how did women entering the professions en masse affect the economy – literally for years without results.
I blame “The Feminine Mystique” (1963) for a lot of this. Unlike most modern-era feminnists, Betty Friedan was not an idiot or notably insane, and probably because of that her book was very influential and pernicious. Spending your life as a housewife (i.e. damn the bougeoisie!) was unfulfilling, and indeed marked you a worthless drain on society.
Well; as opposed to how wonderful and fullfilling it is to spend your youth becoming a reasonably successful lawyer/”editor”/psychologist/middle-managemant corporate psychopath yadda yadda?
There are many women in late middle age without children, husbands, families or meaningful life’s works behind them who have a great deal for which to blame Betty Friedan.