"The trend is not limited to top earners," Reuters notes. "It has been detected among households earning around $80,000 per year." But $80,000 goes a lot further in the middle of the country than it does in New York or San Francisco. A husband has to be fairly affluent for his wife to be able to afford to stay home: "Only a few households can afford to give up a good second income."...Oh, my. I'm not going to try to say everything that's wrong with that. I'll just say:
Marriage and male responsibility for families were once the norm at all levels of American society. Feminism was supposed to liberate women from dependency on men. Instead it has helped to create a two-tiered culture in which the norm is for women to be "chained to a desk," but those who hit the jackpot in the mating game can realistically aspire to escape that status. Nice going, ladies. Happy International Women's Day.
1. A family is an economic unit, and the adults in it should think carefully and clearly about their needs and interests. It may very often work out better, both financially and in terms of happiness, for one person to specialize in bringing in the money, freeing up the partner to contribute in other ways, through child-rearing, homemaking, community service, developing social connections, and innumerable other things that a person not tied to a job can do. There is absolutely no reason that the spouse in the job-free position needs to be the wife.
2. Male or female, a working person can find himself/herself in a stultifying or otherwise unpleasant job, and a job-free spouse may find himself/herself lacking power in an abusive relationship. There's no one answer to how to stay out of the many bad positions a human being can get into. You can go too far protecting yourself from dysfunctional dependency on a lackluster job or a lackluster jobless life. And you can go too far clinging to one or the other. People need to pay attention to the details of their own lives and exercise good judgment as they make their own individual decisions. You can get into trouble using big ideologies to make those decisions.
3. Feminism opened up some new ways of thinking about various life decisions. If women are simply trying to be good feminists and not thinking about their own individual wants and needs, then they're unlikely to be any better off than if they'd unthinkingly followed the old-fashioned traditions. And they're not even good feminists, because they're just doing what they think other people want them to do. Good traditionalists are reflective too. Think for yourself!
4. Is there a "mating game" with "jackpots," in which some women just get lucky? That sounds like a loser's theory. I think there's some skill involved. And it's not a matter of finding the person with the most wealth. A man being rich is like a girl being pretty...
... but you might be happier shopping for a mate a few levels down from the top of the wealth/beauty pyramid. Shop well. Make good decisions. And stop being envious of everyone else. Get your own life in order.
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