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Notes -
One could argue that the expected role of the woman has changed, and now they are all out of the house doing labor (and “labor”) elsewhere. This is frequently to the detriment of their drastically reduced number of children, because young children really do need a mother around most of the time.
I’ve never met a daycare provider or a maid who is even half as good as a half-decent stay-at-home mom. And there are many decent stay-at-home moms out there, women who love their homes and their kids. They just don’t get noticed because of mal-oriented societal norms, and because they aren’t and never can be influencers, and because they understand that they don’t have to become like men or compete with men to be more precious than rubies.
Most of the Western fertility decline was justified and needed. Infant mortality rates approaching 50% were near-universal before the 19th century; the average woman doesn't need to and shouldn't have 4+ children anymore, lest we tempt the spectre of Malthus. (The demographic argument for pro-natalism still applies, but in the long run fertility still needs to converge on replacement.)
Mothers can't be "more precious than rubies" when the job prerequisite is the bare biological minimum expected of a mammalian female. I've seen such pro-natalist exhortations to value motherhood more before, but since status (especially female status) is a zero-sum game, the end result of such efforts is going to look much more like shaming barren women rather than celebrating mothers. It only makes sense for women to branch out into the male realm when the need for their singular area of expertise has been significantly obviated.
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