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Conflating Great Migration and mass migration makes me think you’re reasoning backwards.
As I understand it, immigration slumped during the Depression and didn’t recover until Reagan. Wiki shows a different trend but still suggests the bulk of migration happened before WWI. So I find it unlikely that immigration could explain the effects you want.
Actually, when are those effects, exactly? Because I think it makes a huge difference if you point at the 60s vs 70s vs 80s. Depending on the specific point, I can think of a dozen technologies which have changed how people handle their kids, even without talking about demographics or gang violence.
I think you’re skimming over economics in your rush to blame black people. Automation and the World Wars pulled more and more women out of the home. That alone should have had a bigger effect on childcare.
Do you disagree that a commons of free public schools has declined recently? Or were the schools NEVER good? I follow Moses Kagan on Twitter who I just affluent liberal in LA and I remember one of his tweets were that he would have just paid up for a house in a suburb because of how much it would have saved him on private school tuition. This seems like a common thought to people today that you can’t send your kids to public schools outside of the right suburbs.
What caused this?
I point to migration both internally and externally.
Urban schools being bad goes all the way back to the forced bussing cases in the 1970s, if not earlier. Whether they have got even worse since then, or whether they are less bad (but still not good) varies from city to city. But they haven't got dramatically worse recently in a way which would explain the current fertility drop-off.
In the UK, schools in London are noticeably better than they ever have been, and the primary schools are now some of the best in the world (where a "good school" is defined as one where a child with a 90-110 IQ and no special needs that the school can't manage will learn a lot). This hasn't affected the narrative.
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Women were not pulled out of the home by economics. It was culture- male wages were steadily rising and the US did not experience prolonged unemployment during the period when it shifted from unusual to the default. That cultural shift had knock on economic effects.
I’m not thinking of an economic pull (I.e. needing two jobs to feed your kids). I was thinking about the push (more useful work to be done outside the home). Going off what I read before, the mass manufacturing of household goods, especially textiles, moved women from production into consumption (unless they went into the mills themselves). The same should be true for the midcentury wave of more advanced factories and more consumer goods.
@VoxelVexillologist
There was a definitely cultural shift, too, but i think it depended on the economics. In the Civil War it didn’t matter how many men were conscripted; women could not effectively fill roles in the ironworks or trainyards. Power tools and heavy machinery changed that. The growth of low-training jobs changed that.
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The world was and is naturally very cruel. People died (or at least suffered from) starvation, disease, the elements, etc quite often. Most of history was not a place where even the surviving young children could get away without helping out with the crops or other chores, yet alone the able bodied adult women. The world was not kind enough for freeloaders.
Women worked. They did not work a traditional job, but they worked. In the peasant times, women milked cattle, tilled fields, managed crops, kept chickens, cleaned, made clothing (especially necessary at the time where minor scratches and infections could kill and no A/C or heating), hauled water, picked fruits and vegetables and various other tasks.
Many of those tasks are no longer relevant thanks to economic and technological innovations. We've gone from a time of vast malnutrition to vast overnutrition in the western world, having everyone grow their own crops and milk their own cattle is ridiculous now. Even the tasks that do remain like cleaning or cooking are made significantly easier now thanks to technology. Laundry is no longer a chore that one sets most of their day aside for. Things not only make less dirt (imagine the difference between a sooty fire and the modern oven for instance) but cleaning chemicals are also more efficient and don't take as much to make since they're also done by technology now.
Traditional women's work has just been largely automated away. For a short period of time some of the middle class women were in a social situation where working a job wasn't expected but the housework they would have traditionally been doing was also largely gone, so they got to spend more of their days doing stuff like watching soap operas or whatever. But the time of the lazy do nothing housewife was short lived, and it was always going to be short lived. The economic incentives and advantages to having two productive earners instead of one + parasite is clear and obvious. People with nothing to do will be given something to do, they will be productive as well. The world wars accelerated this, but it was always going to happen as long as people and families value money. It can not be reversed unless you change this fundamental desire for wealth part of humanity, good luck.
From the accounts I'm familiar with before the Industrial Revolution (and even after, if to a more limited extent), there are plenty of women-coded "traditional jobs" that can be done from the house. Sewing, weaving, spinning, and knitting weren't always hobbies, and the results could be sold or done as services for others. Textiles are dirt cheap these days, but accounts from history often have budgets where the cost of clothing isn't that far from rent. Candlemaking comes to mind, too.
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I always roll my eyes when I see someone object to the argument I’ve never seen anyone make when someone says “women haven’t worked,” as if it’s a stand in statement to claim the prevailing paradigm isn’t radically different from the way of the past.
No. Women haven’t always worked. Women have always labored, in some capacity. Women haven’t always had a traditional, 9am-5pm professional vocation, post May Day Demonstrations and Henry Ford. And it’s why the arguments that denigrate the value and labor of the housewife and SAHM never made sense. Oh and by the way, when you come home after a hard day’s work, dinner still has to get made and laundry still has to get done; so get on it.
See comment literally above yours:
That's referring to the "lazy do nothing housewife" thanks to the advent of automating away a lot of housework plus mass food production and the likes. Even though those lazy housewives would still be doing some housework, cooking, shopping, cleaning, child raising, providing sex for their husbands and so forth, that comment just goes "more free time + less manual labour = doing nothing, lazy parasite, of course they got jobs outside the home".
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I think work is a correct term for this, we literally call it "housework" after all. But ok even if we draw a distinction in the terms, so what? Replace instance of "work" with "labored productively" and nothing changes.
But those things are far far easier now, because of technology! Fridges means you don't have to go to the market every single day and the things you buy are way fresher in general. Microwaves and ovens and stoves avoids the hassle of handling and maintaining and cleaning up after the fire. Laundry machines went from spending the whole day tending to clothes, to a few minutes hassle of putting clothes in, switching them over, and pushing a few buttons. Folding is really the only time intensive part of laundry left, and technology is looking to simplify even that.
It's not denigrating housewives to point out simple fact, housework is leagues easier today than the past. That's why people spend tons of money on all those aforementioned machines. Some are so insanely and undeniably useful that even the Amish use them like washing machines
Ah yes, you just put the clothes in and press a button. No sorting by colour/fabric beforehand. No taking out one load and putting in another. No hanging out clothes (if you dry them on a line outside) or putting them in the tumbledryer (if you don't). No putting them away afterwards. Just folding them and that's all! 🤣
I agree that modern automation and white goods has made a vast difference to housework (honestly, the dishwasher we finally got a few years back is amazing) but there still remains some work, and it's not just "five minutes a day".
In fact, for a while, housework went up because of automation and convenience products. Now instead of one day a week for laundry, you would be doing it every day because now you could change your bedsheets and clothing more than once a week. And now you would change clothing and bed linen and so forth more than once a week, because you weren't dirty and lazy were you? And now you vacuumed the house every day because you aren't bringing the rugs out to hang them on a line and beat them. Same with this - you do all this because you want to provide a clean, welcoming home for your family don't you? If they get sick (from unspecified illnesses) due to the dirty house you live in, well... what a failure as a wife and mother, yes?
(This also gave rise to the advertising staple of the clueless husband/man of the family who had to be guided through the tech wonderland of modern cleaning products. And also some that wouldn't fly nowadays).
So swings and roundabouts.
For the vast majority of modern clothes in modern washing machines, this is not necessary. Our detergents are a lot better and our dyes stick on way more.
That's like, a minute or two.
If you don't use the technology then it doesn't save you time.
Literally again, another few minutes (honestly probably more like a single minute if not less but let's count going to the laundry room and back)
Again, another few minutes.
It went from a day of exhaustive and attentive work to barely anything.
Unless you have a massive family, you aren't doing laundry everyday. Five shirts, five pants, five underwear would not fill up my washing machine. What a waste. Put them in the laundry hamper and do it in batches like everyone else. We get 3 days worth I would say but obviously depends on the circumstances.
And if you choose to change bedsheets every day then you're overdoing it. That's just OCD.
Completely unnecessary unless you're tracking in mud.
Yeah this suggests you do have some sort of OCD issue going on then with it. It is not ordinary to change bed sheets and vacuum daily.
I know several women who do vacuum daily. I know several who change bed sheets weekly. As convenience improves, standards go up. Now that it's easy to do laundry, you should do laundry. Playing on fears of infection and social fears of being perceived as dirty or careless was a huge range of advertisements aimed at housewives from the 50s onward.
Today we don't give a damn if a shirt is ironed or not, but it was used as a tool of judgement - are you letting your husband and kids go out in clothes that are not sparkling white? Are you a proper wife and mother? Creating perceived needs and playing on them is what advertising is all about.
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Do Americans not iron their clothes?
No, only formal wear, and not every time.
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I can't remember the last time I had to iron my clothes. Modern "wrinkle-free" stuff (no longer even specifically marketed as wrinkle-free) is genuinely sufficiently wrinkle-free, unlike 20 years ago.
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There's a gap where we do. Business/professional/formal clothing that isn't worth taking to a dry cleaners. But even then, most of my "business casual" attire is "wrinkle-free", and it only needs an ironing once every half-dozen wears. And dry cleaning is dirt cheap.
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That’s exactly the point I was speaking to. There is a value in discouraging women from participating in the “professional workforce,” that’s wholly distinct from the concept of laboring in general. That’s why I said (incidentally it’s also why Elizabeth Warren wrote the book The Middle Income Trap) once you’re done for the day at work and you come home, dinner still has to be made and the laundry still has to get done anyway. And that’s true whether you stay at home and raise the children or choose to go to work.
Exactly. So it should be even easier for them to stay home.
The exact opposite. The opportunity cost of staying home increases the less housework there is to be done, which just means more pressure to get out there and get a job so long as people want more wealth. And people wanting more and more wealth is a fundamental part of humanity that isn't being changed anytime soon. Automating housework was always going to end up with women getting out of house work. Two earner wealth > One earner wealth is simple, obvious, and undeniable. One has to change the very nature of our species to prevent it.
And we can prove this simply by looking at real world economies. There's not really any country that is civilized and automated that doesn't get the women eventually going out of their daily chores housework and into the workforce. There is not many real world examples where the average woman in the country sits around all day drinking tea and watching TV, they're either too poor to have automation (in which case the women is doing all the intensive and time consuming housework) or they're automated and the women are getting jobs.
The only possible exceptions I can think of are like, the gulf state nations rich off oil and immigrant laborers (and even those aren't entirely fair since we're substituting the housewife work with domestic underclass women work, so women are still working so there's still tons of women working). So I guess if you can get a nation that makes a substantial part of their money off pure luck, with repressive religious dictatorships that enforce their beliefs against their own citizens economic incentives and a super poor underclass that flows in to do work for them, you can get it.
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That is not necessarily true. "Easier" can mean different things. Idle hands are the devil's workshop and whatnot. Suppose you've got a mother of three children, they are a baby, a three year old, and a five year old. In a traditional household, there would be washing day, when she and her neighbors go down to the stream to wash, you all bring your children, and the children splash around in the stream. You would have pastry making day, when your sister brings her kids over, they kick a ball around the street, and you make pastry together. You spend a lot of time making clothes, and your older daughter is gradually also learning to sew, and the younger kids are out watching some other kids kick a ball around.
(This was not true of the American West, but the Dustbowl West sounded like a uniquely nightmarish place to raise children)
Now, you can still invite your friend and her children to the stream, but you're just sitting around watching the children. You can still make pastry together, but you realize this is a bit futile, because the pastry at the store is both better and cheaper, and the children cannot kick the ball around the street, there are cars, and no other kids their age. You can sew with your daughter, but it's just a hobby, and mostly for cosplay. And so on. Armenians have Rug Beating Week, when they air out and beat their rugs, all at the same time. You're replacing a communal activity with having to make up activities to avoid boredom, which feels quite different.
The thing is, when a preschool organizes activities to enrich children, give them opportunities to play with nature, etc. it's a worthy job, economically beneficial, adds to GDP. When their own mothers do this it's unproductive.
I posit that even with modern appliances, there is enough work to be done in the hearth that would make up a full productive life for a stay at home mother. And in fact, we are seeing a lot of ills caused by a dearth of stay at home mothers. Maintaining the house, creating and implementing a safe environment for young children that still encourages them to stretch their capabilities, teaching children to read before 1st grade and tutoring them in their school work, reading to children good books that grow their soul, chauffeuring children to activities, planning and executing parties and social events, grocery inventory management and procurement, preparing healthy food, these are things that can fill in a calendar.
How much of the demise of socialization can be attributed to losing the free project management that unpaid homemakers provided to their communities?
Sure, their lives would be less busy than women's lives a century ago. A lot of the work has gotten less labor intensive. But this is also true of the jobs outside the home. Men used to work 12 hour days with physical labor, now they work 8 hours with largely mental labor.
It is also more possible for homemakers to check out, do the bare minimum, and watch soap operas. But I posit that this is also possible for lots of people with 40 hour normal jobs. Else why do Motte posts become more frequent during normal American business hours?
I would like for every household to own productive property, such that the household can be a productive unit again. Lots of people go in that direction with the Internet, 3D printers, drop shipping, etc. But it seems to me that there is enough for the average mother to do now at home that their lives aren't completely boring and pointless.
Makework is always possible, but I'm skeptical that it's worthwhile on current margins.
For example:
There isn't really a point in teaching kids that young. For example, dropping arithmetic entirely until 6th grade resulted in zero learning loss by the end of sixth grade.
More broadly, you can only tutor kids or shuttle them around when they aren't in school, and mostly that is compatible with work outside the home. And if you live in a place with functional public transit it isn't necessary to shuttle them and it's probably good for their independence to let them figure it out themselves.
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They were pulled from the home by economic incentives, not economic need. As wages rose, employment became an increasingly attractive alternative to staying home.
I actually think this is only half truth. The issue here is with the welfare state and rise of taxation. The tax as percent of GDP was remarkably low in 19th century: between 1-3% of GDP. This changed after WW1 and The New Deal rising to 15% and 20% GDP, peaking at 30% by 1960s.
This is however artificial incentive. For instance today the average cost of elementary school student in USA is $17k a year. Imagine if family with three children can decide: wife stays at home, maybe creates a pod with other mothers and manages schooling and the government gives them $51k tax credit a year and they spend it as they want. Maybe children have to pass a test on par with at least with second lowest decile results compared to local public school. On top of that the wife can cook, she can take care of household chores and to other management such as driving and so forth. Also she could easily sell her surplus of cakes or jams on market or outside of house without constant government meddling with endless regulation. Her net contribution toward household could easily approach $100k a year.
This is the tragedy of the current situation. Women still take care of children, do the laundry, they do bring beer and sandwich to men, they still take care of elderly and sick as they used to do it in the past - in capacity such as teachers, maids, waitresses, cooks and nurses. Only they do it for strangers and not for their own family, losing value in the process. It is all just and illusion and scam.
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