During the Progressive Era, it was female volunteers who led the fights for child labor bans, factory inspection, stronger food and drug laws and the like. For years, the fussy small-town clubwoman and the Carrie Nationish crusader were instantly recognizable figures of caricature precisely because they were ubiquitous in American life. Their descendants not only have careers, they also have children later in life, in the midst of what would once have been their prime volunteering years. Putnam resists focusing on women's paid labor as a drain on civic engagement. But if the women who led community efforts in the past are busy elsewhere, and those efforts fall into desuetude as a result, that reduces everyone else's opportunities to participate in one too.
Television viewing certainly makes a more politically palatable target than women's paid labor.
Not many of us leap to the defense of couch potato-ism as a civic virtue, whereas quite a few of us defend the expansion of autonomy and opportunity for women. But to say that the large-scale entrance of women into the labor market has exerted a significant effect on community life is not to deal in blame. It's to accept the reality that we are all in this together now, men, women and children. Women who work all day at demanding jobs have fewer hours and less energy to devote to community activities. And sometimes freedoms that we would not want to renounce come at the expense of social connectedness.