If the goal is gender equality: what's wrong with this?
The idea that every able bodied person has to work is not supposed to be the way our society functions; at least not in the last 100,000 years.
The idea that every able bodied person has to work is not supposed to be the way our society functions; at least not in the last 100,000 years.
Women in that age range are generally more educated than their male counterparts and they earn more, so this statistic makes sense. They also have trouble finding a male partner, especially because one of their requirements is that they should earn more than them.
This sounds like an impending demographics / societal disaster.
I guess if this trends continue we'll get to a point where basic necessities will all raise in price because they can't find workers until some of these men go back to work.
It's not just the women's requirements: boys, at least those coming from a still somewhat traditional provider/homemaker household (and many effectively are even if she also has a well paying job) tend to be not really prepared for a role other than provider. But unless they are super conservative outliers they also don't expect to end up with a homemaker partner, at least not unless some freak accident makes them end up in trophy wife territory. They believe that women should be modern and all that, but they lack a clear idea of how they themselves would fit into the picture. Many find a way nonetheless, but others are bound for greybeard boyhood.
What? I was under the impression that particularly in agrarian societies, everyone who was able to work, worked. Are you saying that surpluses allowed for a large class of people to just not work at all?
Apparently this is the case today, since it's happening.
Historically, agrarian societies did require everyone to work - twice a year. During harvesting and planting, as much manpower as possible was needed. The rest of the time didn't require 40h of work 50 weeks out of the year. It left time for leisure, building, crafting, etc.
We're also not really in a traditional agrarian society today; most of the work required to create food is done by a vast minority of society using force-multiplying tools.
Yes, we're not a traditional agrarian society, or a hunter gatherer society - that's why "the last 100,000" years was a surprise. Essentially the op was saying every able bodied person has never been required to work. That ran counter to my understanding of history.
Because fabric for cloth magically appears from nothing and they sew themselves. Same for bedheets and such, they fill themselves.. And candles are gift from Santa, animals dont need care and houses fix themselves. Wood is just there, without preparing and cutting it.
Yo and food also creates itself from grains, just like that. And small kids changed their own diapers and washed them.
Speaking of which, did you tried washing without washing machine and modern chemistry? It used to be huge physically demanding work.
You can see the large amount of extra time available in old religious and cultural holidays which were both numerous and often spanned many days or a week or more at a time. Huge chunks of time of the year that many modern workers wouldn't be allowed leave from work nor afford if they could.
You can also see Egyptian pyramid construction which is now thought to have been mostly (but certainly not exclusively) volunteer farm workers in the off season in exchange for booze and "luxury" services like studied dentistry services that otherwise didn't exist in most of the rest of the world yet. If they wanted they could just live off their own share of crops and dick around most of the year though. Working on the pyramids was a bonus, not a requirement, and their scale proves how many free man hours they had to "waste" on stuff like building giant stone mounds and carvings and art and other religious practices. Their success is marked by how many excess man hours people had to dick around with.
Egypt used corvée labour to build the pyramids. It was certainly a requirement for those people.
There is middle class white ideal and then there is reality of people needing to eat. They did not had careers, but they needed money and only other option is stealing.
Men were emplyed more and home required a lot more work then now. But still, lower class women needed jobs.
So? Working in the home is also the norm for men. Historically, the norm is that men are self-employed in agriculture and women are self-employed in textile production.
> And it's only really the last 20 years women haven't been REQUIRED to opt out of working once they got married or had kids...
Note that being a hard worker is traditionally one of the highest female virtues. They have never been required to stop working after getting married; they had to work just like everybody else.
Or you could cut everyone's dominant hand off. Equality achieved!
Most of us don't want that kind of equality.