My parents had a real old-fashioned marriage. I have a lot of respect for my parents and I learned from them what the positives are for an old-fashioned marriage where the man is the primary breadwinner and the wife is primarily devoted to the needs of the family and does the "women's work."
I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. For that and other reasons, I thought I would have some modern marriage where we both had real careers and we divided up the household chores.
But that's not how that went down.
Much to my shock and personal frustration, I ended up with some 1950s-style marriage where he was the breadwinner and I was a full-time wife and mom. So I spent my twenties checking books out of the library on various women's issues trying to figure out what the hell happened to my life.
Long story short: I ultimately concluded that there is absolutely nothing inherently evil about the paradigm of male breadwinner and female homemaker. It was not designed by evil psycho controlling nutcase misogynists to oppress women.
For thousands and thousands of years, it was a pattern that worked well to serve the needs of men, women and children and provide a good quality of life for everyone. It helped people thrive in a world where most cultures were subsistence cultures.
My late father was born in the 1920s. He was one of five kids and he grew up on a farm. A disabled uncle lived with them because he had permanent lung damage from exposure to Mustard Gas in World War I and he could still work on the family farm but couldn't support himself independently.
My father told me that his mother was constantly cooking. There were no microwave ovens or TV dinners. There were no store-bought pre-packaged snacks and although cola drinks existed, he said "No one could afford the nickel it cost to buy one."
This was a time when Another day, another dollar was literal. A dollar a day was a common wage for a working adult when my father was growing up.
Culture is what gets passed on that people have figured out works well and it gets passed on memetically. Someone figures out a thing that works well and others mimic it. They copy it.
And there isn't necessarily a lot of analysis about why it worked well and how to adapt it if something changes. So people who don't understand WHY it worked or what circumstances necessitated it are very often resistant to change because it's hard to find anything that works well in this world and the price for getting it wrong can literally be death.
So I think what is going on in the world is we inherited a lot of behavioral and cultural norms rooted in that heteronormative nuclear family model but it doesn't work so well these days. Things have changed and we don't know how to adapt to some new reality and we don't understand why those behaviors we inherited made sense back then but don't anymore.
In the US today, we mostly no longer have large extended families with many children and aunts, uncles or grandparents living with us. We have lots of single parents, childless couples and unattached adults.
So we have a lot of households with one to three members where expecting one person to pick up after everyone else and do all the cooking is no longer a significant gain in efficiency for society. That person is picking up after one or two other people, not eight or ten, and they may be spending just as much time cooking as it takes to cook for a family of ten while only feeding one to three people.
I think our housing norms are broken because we build housing in the US that is rooted in that nuclear family model and we need to be building housing that works for small households of one to three people. I try to write about that in various places.
I think our work paradigms are rooted in designing paid jobs explicitly for a male breadwinner with a dependent wife and children and we need to diverge away from that. I try to write about that on Butterfly Economy though at the moment I am still struggling with that.
Over the years, I have seen a lot of comments online indicating that people are feeling very burdened by the process of trying to feed themselves these days. I am trying to figure out how to write about how my household solved that on a blog called Nutrient Dense though it is currently only an About page.
This blog is rooted in part in my experiences working at a Fortune 500 company. I was getting divorced and my two sons were still living with me and I successfully got them to take over most of the "women's work" at home so I could put more of my time and energy into my job.
I was a divorced single mom with special-needs kids and no car. I was really poor and a lot of people were giving me rides home from work and we would talk as they drove me home.
And at some point a lot of them would go "You poor thing. After working all day, now you have to cook." And I would say "No. I maybe need to chop some vegetables. My oldest son does all the cooking. Dinner is probably nearly ready and will be served to me shortly after I walk in the door."
They would begin to stutter and stammer and turn green with envy. THEY apparently had to go home and start dinner after working all day but I did not.
I see a lot of people finding life really painful right now and I think I have some idea of why that is and how to help them. But, unfortunately, a lot of voices that preceded mine are angry voices that express the idea that men are all evil assholes just taking advantage of women and mistreating them, so it's hard to find a path forward that doesn't get me a ton of hatred from people who think I am attacking them and telling them they are bad and stupid or something.
I don't think the pain the world is in right now is because we are bad and stupid. I don't think the things we inherited from past generations were intended to harm us or oppress us.
I think it worked well to keep people alive for much of human history and now we are better at keeping people alive and that's resulted in us having fewer kids, living longer, etc. So those norms are now outdated and no longer serve us well.
I think things ARE changing and will continue to change with or without my writing. I am a speck in an ocean and what I think isn't hugely important.
But I need to eat and writing is something I can do in spite of my medical situation and I think if I can figure out how to write well on these topics, it can ease the pain of the transition for other people. So I persist in trying to figure out how to write about these ideas.
Maybe someday people will stop being all affronted at my attempts to be helpful to them and will kick enough money my way that my life will actually work too.
I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. For that and other reasons, I thought I would have some modern marriage where we both had real careers and we divided up the household chores.
But that's not how that went down.
Much to my shock and personal frustration, I ended up with some 1950s-style marriage where he was the breadwinner and I was a full-time wife and mom. So I spent my twenties checking books out of the library on various women's issues trying to figure out what the hell happened to my life.
Long story short: I ultimately concluded that there is absolutely nothing inherently evil about the paradigm of male breadwinner and female homemaker. It was not designed by evil psycho controlling nutcase misogynists to oppress women.
For thousands and thousands of years, it was a pattern that worked well to serve the needs of men, women and children and provide a good quality of life for everyone. It helped people thrive in a world where most cultures were subsistence cultures.
My late father was born in the 1920s. He was one of five kids and he grew up on a farm. A disabled uncle lived with them because he had permanent lung damage from exposure to Mustard Gas in World War I and he could still work on the family farm but couldn't support himself independently.
My father told me that his mother was constantly cooking. There were no microwave ovens or TV dinners. There were no store-bought pre-packaged snacks and although cola drinks existed, he said "No one could afford the nickel it cost to buy one."
This was a time when Another day, another dollar was literal. A dollar a day was a common wage for a working adult when my father was growing up.
"Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one." -- Hattie McDanielSo my father's mother was cooking from scratch to feed a family of eight people using food grown on their farm. Her spending most of her time in the kitchen doing the cooking to feed the family was an efficient use of time and very necessary. There were no ready substitutes for what she was doing.
Culture is what gets passed on that people have figured out works well and it gets passed on memetically. Someone figures out a thing that works well and others mimic it. They copy it.
And there isn't necessarily a lot of analysis about why it worked well and how to adapt it if something changes. So people who don't understand WHY it worked or what circumstances necessitated it are very often resistant to change because it's hard to find anything that works well in this world and the price for getting it wrong can literally be death.
So I think what is going on in the world is we inherited a lot of behavioral and cultural norms rooted in that heteronormative nuclear family model but it doesn't work so well these days. Things have changed and we don't know how to adapt to some new reality and we don't understand why those behaviors we inherited made sense back then but don't anymore.
In the US today, we mostly no longer have large extended families with many children and aunts, uncles or grandparents living with us. We have lots of single parents, childless couples and unattached adults.
So we have a lot of households with one to three members where expecting one person to pick up after everyone else and do all the cooking is no longer a significant gain in efficiency for society. That person is picking up after one or two other people, not eight or ten, and they may be spending just as much time cooking as it takes to cook for a family of ten while only feeding one to three people.
I think our housing norms are broken because we build housing in the US that is rooted in that nuclear family model and we need to be building housing that works for small households of one to three people. I try to write about that in various places.
I think our work paradigms are rooted in designing paid jobs explicitly for a male breadwinner with a dependent wife and children and we need to diverge away from that. I try to write about that on Butterfly Economy though at the moment I am still struggling with that.
Over the years, I have seen a lot of comments online indicating that people are feeling very burdened by the process of trying to feed themselves these days. I am trying to figure out how to write about how my household solved that on a blog called Nutrient Dense though it is currently only an About page.
This blog is rooted in part in my experiences working at a Fortune 500 company. I was getting divorced and my two sons were still living with me and I successfully got them to take over most of the "women's work" at home so I could put more of my time and energy into my job.
I was a divorced single mom with special-needs kids and no car. I was really poor and a lot of people were giving me rides home from work and we would talk as they drove me home.
And at some point a lot of them would go "You poor thing. After working all day, now you have to cook." And I would say "No. I maybe need to chop some vegetables. My oldest son does all the cooking. Dinner is probably nearly ready and will be served to me shortly after I walk in the door."
They would begin to stutter and stammer and turn green with envy. THEY apparently had to go home and start dinner after working all day but I did not.
I see a lot of people finding life really painful right now and I think I have some idea of why that is and how to help them. But, unfortunately, a lot of voices that preceded mine are angry voices that express the idea that men are all evil assholes just taking advantage of women and mistreating them, so it's hard to find a path forward that doesn't get me a ton of hatred from people who think I am attacking them and telling them they are bad and stupid or something.
I don't think the pain the world is in right now is because we are bad and stupid. I don't think the things we inherited from past generations were intended to harm us or oppress us.
I think it worked well to keep people alive for much of human history and now we are better at keeping people alive and that's resulted in us having fewer kids, living longer, etc. So those norms are now outdated and no longer serve us well.
I think things ARE changing and will continue to change with or without my writing. I am a speck in an ocean and what I think isn't hugely important.
But I need to eat and writing is something I can do in spite of my medical situation and I think if I can figure out how to write well on these topics, it can ease the pain of the transition for other people. So I persist in trying to figure out how to write about these ideas.
Maybe someday people will stop being all affronted at my attempts to be helpful to them and will kick enough money my way that my life will actually work too.