by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-10 18:08:33+00:00
"women have long been the keepers of the family social calendar. Wives, not husbands, historically planned the quilting parties, the bridge games, and the neighborhood potlucks. But in the second half of the 20th century, many women swapped unpaid family jobs for salaried positions."

This is a very good observation, and I think that somewhere in the social revolutions of the 20th century, we failed to appreciate the extremely important historical roles women played that were central to traditional societies. Even today, we believe the stock caricatures of pre-feminist societies, which in a way is unsurprising, given that most people alive today never experienced anything other than the post-revolutionary world. We just accept caricature as fact, and we view history anachronistically through the lens of our present social realities.

In traditional societies, the family assumes the basic and most important social unit and social point of reference, with the married couple as the foundation for it. This already creates a network of social ties that radiate from the marriage, most conspicuously family ties which are doubled. Husbands typically gravitated toward the public sphere, securing the material well-being of the family through their participation in public life (in other words, their work was primarily for the sake of the domestic sphere). Wives typically gravitated toward the domestic sphere which was the seat of family life. So while men were heads of the family, women were heads of the household. And this was an honor, as family life was the primary business of life; the husband's career or job was primarily in service to family life. Ideally, husbands provided the means that allowed wives to be free to be mothers, unburdened by competing commitments. (Of course, this doesn't mean fathers did not participate in domestic life, nor that women did not participate in public life. It is rather a matter of emphasis and "center of gravity", so to speak.) By analogy, kings are exalted fathers, and queens are exalted mothers.

And since the family is the center of social life, and women are mistresses of the domestic sphere, it is fitting that women should have a more social orientation. Indeed, it is expected that women would be the catalysts of many of the social ties with the broader community.

In that sense, the careerism that women today are taught from an early age to pursue and prioritize not only deprives women of the opportunity to function as wives and mothers, most exalted and honored roles that they are, but it deprives society of much of its social glue, as women have a greater tendencies to care about cultivating social bonds than men do.

What we're taught today instead is that the career, not family life, is the supreme occupation of life and the primary source of our happiness. We are therefore taught that women were historically deprived of this opportunity, chained to the bleak life of being "stay-at-home moms" (a vicious term, if there ever was one), covered in baby puke and toddler shit, under the tyrannical boot of her husband like some slave. We demean motherhood as some kind of drudgery for poor, uneducated, unattractive women instead of the privilege that it is, in fact the privilege of raising the future generation. Children are no longer a wonderful gift, but a burden and an obstacle. You might be able to turn them into sources of prestige, if you can get them into the best schools or whatever. The career is the center of life; children, the family, even the spouse - these are all secondary now.

And this has downstream effects that cause a radical transformation of society and culture that affects the entire social and economic environment, like the atrophy of social ties mentioned in the article. For instance, try supporting a family on a single income today (in the 1950s, a middle class/working class man could do just that). Now women who want to live in a traditional way are constrained in that choice, as economic and social realities make that difficult. That's why I roll my eyes when someone thinks bucking demographic decline is just a matter of throwing some money at the problem. Our society and our culture has become hostile to family life. The grain and pattern of modern life, rather than supporting it, adds friction and resistance. And since family life is the foundation for the rest, the health or lack thereof of family life is a predictor of the health of the broader society.