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Notes -
My understanding is that there used to be fewer women in the workplace and more at home. When people say that before the 1970's, women had fewer rights than men in America, I assume that this is what they're referring to.
But it just occurred to me that there was no Jim Crow equivalent for women. Was anything stopping women from entering the workplace before? Was there anything that propelled them to do so?
Historically poor women have always worked, and have worked outside the home in large numbers in cities since the Industrial Revolution made the previous system of cottage industries economically untenable. In the US, single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930, so well before the sexual revolution. The archetypal Victorian factory - if in textiles, paper, pottery or a number of other industries - also employed large numbers of women. A lot of female labor force participation graphs from the mid-20th century also limit the y axis to somewhere around 45-75%, so the growth looks larger as a proportion of the starting number. Even in the 1960s, a substantial number of women worked outside the home.
People who talk about the civil rights era and women usually have no idea what they’re talking about. Equality of the sexes was inserted as a poison pill by a Southern Democrat in the 1964 act, but it passed anyway and nobody paid it much attention. Profession specific bars were dropped for a variety of reasons, while prosecution of sexual harassment in the workplace was more of a cultural shift than a legal one, since a lot of it had always been a crime under various other terms.
That makes sense. Thank you for your answer. This opens up another question, though: if not much has actually changed for women, what explains The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness?
Careers don't make most women happy in the long term, which is why you can see a trend of highly competent and successful women leaving their extremely lucrative and successful careers by the time they reach their 30s. For example, when you look at lawyers, 30% of women with JDs are unemployed from the ages of 36-40 compared to just 4% of men.
There's a recent survey of women lawyers leaving their firms that indicated that 82% of women left due to lack of flexibility and work/life balance. The article on the survey tries to paint the picture that women aren't leaving for the commonly held belief to be stay-at-home moms, but it's clear the high-stress and workload jobs at the top law firms aren't making women happy, because if it made them happy, why would they quit? The men aren't quitting, in fact, they'll gladly work 60-80 hours a week because the men in these professions are highly conscientious competitive people who find their sense of worth from dominating their chosen area of competence and will put in those extra hours to beat the guys that don't. You don't see them complain about work/life balance because to them it's one aspect they can use to win against their competition. Jordan Peterson talks about women who quit their careers in this 11 minutes video and is worth watching if you want more reasons why women leave their careers. There are a lot of interesting tidbits in that video that I don't want to bother quoting right now.
Something to keep in mind is that a lot of guys also wouldn't be happy working 60-80 hours a week. That's why most men aren't CEOs, doctors, lawyers. But there are enough men with that drive, and those men outnumber women with that kind of disposition. Men also find fulfillment in providing for their families, which is why many men deliberately choose to work overtime if they can, to earn more money for their family. Women can show their love and support for their family, but they'd rather do it in the presence of their family rather than slave away at a job where they are away from their family.
What feminism has done is tell women that they don't need a man, they don't need to do traditionally female tasks, and they can go out there and work and compete just like men in all those highly respected and sought-after professions and fields. As a result, a bunch of women pursued extremely tough and competitive careers, only to find out that it didn't make them happy. Is it such a surprise that working a highly stressful, competitive job with a lot of responsibility is really, really tough and doesn't give you time to do much else? Most men wouldn't want to do those jobs, which is why most men don't do those jobs. Feminism took a slice of the male population, a slice that is highly irregular, and told women that they should all be just like these highly competitive conscientious men. And they'll be happy doing so.
Women in general would be much happier raising a family than working a highly stressful job. Women prefer to work and be with people, and properly raising a family ensures that you'll have people around you well into your deathbed. However, because feminism has pushed women to pursue a career and actively put disdain on traditional female roles, more and more women are delaying or ignoring the idea of being a mother. By the time these women realize that careers don't make them happy and that they might want children, it might be too late. And if they're lucky enough to still be able to have children, well they still have to find a suitable partner to be their husband. Women tend to date across or up the social ladder, so if you're a highly successful woman, your options become quite limited. And their success is to their detriment, as men don't care how much the woman makes, and men prefer younger women. Thus, we're seeing the rise of childless old women and as they get older they slowly lose their social connections and without having a family they become more and more isolated. As a result, we see more and more women get depressed as all they to show for their life is a career they don't care about and the bitter truth that feminism lied to them, as their now aging bodies are too old to have children.
Some women resort to freezing their eggs so that their age won't be a problem, but there are many issues related to egg freezing. If the frozen eggs no longer work, as it hasn't for so many women, then they truly have no option to bear children as by the time they do go ahead and use their eggs their bodies are too old to have children.
Other ideas may have factored into "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion, but I'm not going to explore these ideas further right now.
Great post! Thank you!
No low effort "Great post" posts, please.
Is this a new rule? I haven't been around much recently but I don't recall it from the earlier days of ssc/themotte. No judgment here, just curious.
Low effort posts have always been against the rules, though it's not one of the most strictly enforced rules. But we do want to avoid allowing one-line "I agree!" or "No" posts cluttering up threads.
Thanks for the context. I guess the ones I'm remembering being an accepted part of community norms were a little more lyrical than "Great post thanks", but the content was roughly the same.
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Social networks declined, and this has a bigger effect on female than male happiness.
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