The "conventional family structure" may have made sense - or even been somewhat patriarchal - prior to 1850 or so, when a woman could expect to bear and raise 6-10 children; produce all the knitted clothing and cut and sew all the cloth-based clothing for the household; produce all meals from basic ingredients (having grown many of the v…
The "conventional family structure" may have made sense - or even been somewhat patriarchal - prior to 1850 or so, when a woman could expect to bear and raise 6-10 children; produce all the knitted clothing and cut and sew all the cloth-based clothing for the household; produce all meals from basic ingredients (having grown many of the vegetables and produced the eggs in her own garden); do laundry using boiling water, lye and a wringer; and keep the house clean and tidy.
The trajectory of productivity has meant that today, in a "traditional" household, the "breadwinner" produces all the family's clothing, brings in all the food with much of it in near-ready-to-eat form, and provides capital equipment that keeps the food fresh and turns laundry (and meal cleanup) into trivial chores; meanwhile the mother produces and raises 1.2 children when they are not at school.
As for spending time with the children themselves, I think I recall that modern breadwinner fathers spend more time with their children than female homemakers did even a few generations ago. So, the trajectory away from the "conventional" structure has not hurt children in that respect.
The "traditional" family structure is something people should, of course, be free to choose; but to claim it's the "right" structure - or one that should be imposed by force on unhappy breadwinners, as we do across the western world - is... debatable.
"prior to 1850 or so, when a woman could expect to.........................."
I'll only quibble with this point. I don't think a single woman was ever expected to do all of this without any support whatsoever. In every culture in the world prior to the 20th century (more so in non-Western cultures but this was the norm in the West too), extended multi-generational families provided a lot of support. And domestic help was far more ubiquitous.
Aside from this, I don't know if we disagree on anything. I believe you misunderstood the point of my earlier comment. I wasn't trying to paint the conventional family structure as the ideal, or advocating that it should be mandatory. I was responding to John Stonehedge's comment about women not getting compensated for their work (which was ample). I was saying that the conventional family structure imposed responsibilities on both men and women as well as "compensated" both of them (because their partners took responsibility for different spheres of activity), but John (and perhaps feminists in general) doesn't see it that way because he only considers the income one makes working in some impersonal capacity as important. In that view, the woman is doing unpaid labor almost like a slave (disregarding the fact that she benefits from her partner's income) whereas the man is having fun and possessing privilege (disregarding the fact that he puts in a lot of hard work, sometimes in drudge work and sometimes in dangerous jobs). I think that is terribly reductive.
In the modern world, if domestic work is not as onerous or rewarding as it traditionally used to be whereas impersonal work and career-building are very fulfilling (as they are to me personally), then there is no problem in people sharing their roles as well as responsibilities for producing incomes as well as domestic work, as you say.
The "conventional family structure" may have made sense - or even been somewhat patriarchal - prior to 1850 or so, when a woman could expect to bear and raise 6-10 children; produce all the knitted clothing and cut and sew all the cloth-based clothing for the household; produce all meals from basic ingredients (having grown many of the vegetables and produced the eggs in her own garden); do laundry using boiling water, lye and a wringer; and keep the house clean and tidy.
The trajectory of productivity has meant that today, in a "traditional" household, the "breadwinner" produces all the family's clothing, brings in all the food with much of it in near-ready-to-eat form, and provides capital equipment that keeps the food fresh and turns laundry (and meal cleanup) into trivial chores; meanwhile the mother produces and raises 1.2 children when they are not at school.
As for spending time with the children themselves, I think I recall that modern breadwinner fathers spend more time with their children than female homemakers did even a few generations ago. So, the trajectory away from the "conventional" structure has not hurt children in that respect.
The "traditional" family structure is something people should, of course, be free to choose; but to claim it's the "right" structure - or one that should be imposed by force on unhappy breadwinners, as we do across the western world - is... debatable.
"prior to 1850 or so, when a woman could expect to.........................."
I'll only quibble with this point. I don't think a single woman was ever expected to do all of this without any support whatsoever. In every culture in the world prior to the 20th century (more so in non-Western cultures but this was the norm in the West too), extended multi-generational families provided a lot of support. And domestic help was far more ubiquitous.
Aside from this, I don't know if we disagree on anything. I believe you misunderstood the point of my earlier comment. I wasn't trying to paint the conventional family structure as the ideal, or advocating that it should be mandatory. I was responding to John Stonehedge's comment about women not getting compensated for their work (which was ample). I was saying that the conventional family structure imposed responsibilities on both men and women as well as "compensated" both of them (because their partners took responsibility for different spheres of activity), but John (and perhaps feminists in general) doesn't see it that way because he only considers the income one makes working in some impersonal capacity as important. In that view, the woman is doing unpaid labor almost like a slave (disregarding the fact that she benefits from her partner's income) whereas the man is having fun and possessing privilege (disregarding the fact that he puts in a lot of hard work, sometimes in drudge work and sometimes in dangerous jobs). I think that is terribly reductive.
In the modern world, if domestic work is not as onerous or rewarding as it traditionally used to be whereas impersonal work and career-building are very fulfilling (as they are to me personally), then there is no problem in people sharing their roles as well as responsibilities for producing incomes as well as domestic work, as you say.