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Notes -
Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"
On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).
On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).
Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:
And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".
Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".
This is a choice everyone's making, yes. Because we value qualifications more than we value children. As far as the things that humans need other humans to do, many, perhaps most, don't really need college. I like college, I enjoyed going, and am the sort of person who might have just kept going forever if I could have, but it's not actually the case that the only jobs that need to get done are chopping onions 10 hrs a day, or academic tasks. And AI is set to gut the college level tasks before the manual ones anyway. If our civilization is wealthy enough to provide it, I'm basically still fine with every young adult getting to go make friends and read books for several years, it's lovely, but it's not inevitable.
I agree with other commenters that both parents working outside the home is also, to a large extent, a choice most people are making, because otherwise we'd have to make a lot of sacrifices for unclear benefits. Being a stay at home parent of young children is exhausting and frustrating. Being a stay at home wife without children, or with older children, is not respectable. I know people who are homeschooling their children while their husbands work perfectly ordinary lower middle class jobs, it's possible for people who really want to do it. It's just kind of frustrating, lonely, and tedious for those who aren't naturally inclined that way (which seems to be most people).
The first college students studied under professors without college degrees!
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