Not your mom

In response to Not your mom by betenoire:

The "seeds of the good girl are planted very early, as adaughter observes the way the individuals in her home interact witheach other and absorbs the messages her parents send ...

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Rather than hijack betenoire's journal, I decided the points I've raised might best be discussed here.

It is work and work that is often required of women.

This is a rather strong claim. Many of the items on that list are not "required" at all, but are optional. If neither parent (assuming the patriarchal model of two-adult childrearing) chose to engage in them, the children would most likely still turn out just fine without them.

That there is a correlation of gender with performance of these tasks is important to look at, but that does not indicate that the performance is a necessity.

I dislike when people try to persuade me that being single is somehow a deviation

May I suggest surrounding yourself with a better class of people. We do exist.

but many women already realise that hence why marriage is declining.

Actually, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy would argue that marriage (and TFR in affluent Western societies) is declining because of evolved propensities to offset childbearing so long as environmental conditions continue to appear to be improving.i.e., as long as a better, more abundant future, is anticipated, investing in the cost of lifegiving in the present is ecologically irrational.

This ecological heuristic did not evolve in environments where conditions continued, more-or-less, to improve throughout the lifespan. (There was no career advancement or entrepreneurship for our primate forebears.) This is the SES-TFR paradox.

Admittedly, many women have made an informed choice about their reproductive futures--including the institutional forms they are willing or not willing to adopt in furtherance of their choices to reproduce or not--having immersed themselves in feminist history and theory enough to really think such issues through.

Many, however, are simply pursing the economic and personal freedoms that feminists before them won the hard way, the decisions about marriage and childbearing being more an ultimate outcome of their more mundane day-to-day evaluations of the opportunities before them than a conscious decision to avoid the shackles of marriage.

In a sense, we've out-evolved ourselves: our very affluence (achieved, in large part, through feminism) keeps us from reproducing or engaging in economic arrangments (however oppressively or non-oppressively structured) that organize the activities of reproduction.

By us, of course, I mean the most affluent, as those who continue to live in less favorable SES strata continue to evaluate the opportunities before them, and make decisions resulting in higher total TFR. Feminism can only reach these populations by giving them the tools of greater economic choice.

Of course, this results in forms of racial and class oppression. (Who's children will predominantly be paying for your social security and medicare benefits in a few decades? What color will their skin be? What language will have been spoken at home when they were growing up?) But I've already gone well beyond the scope of this thread.

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