I would think marital status is relevant here too -- is there data to evaluate that? Divorced women and single mothers are going to be the demographics most likely to disagree with traditional gender roles (i.e., those who tell their daughters, "You can never rely on a man.")
I wonder how much of the black Protestant gap can be explained by marital status. I would guess that most churchgoing black Protestant men are married and most of the women are not. Perhaps even a majority of the women are single mothers (or were in their youth).
I think a factor that a lot of people aren’t mentioning is that it’s just not financially feasible to only have one parent working anymore for a large number of Americans.
Not just a factor, probably THE major factor for the vast majority of us...and probably/possibly a factor in the drop in marriage rates in the US...and probably globally too...too.
Sure. Though in my experience, people often fall into the traditional roles as they learn more about life and themselves. I don't think that what people say here is always an indication of how they will end up living their lives.
And on the other side, I'll be honest, while I'm traditional-minded, I would probably be OK with being a stay-at-home, homeschooling dad. I never would have thought that before I had kids, but now I just wish I had the time to teach them everything I would like to teach them, and it turns out I don't.
I think the issue here is that many women do not want to be homemakers and the men who are looking for homemaker wives just need to look much much harder than before.
I’m not entirely convinced that many people grow into their traditional sex roles as they get older. We’d see different statistics if that was the case.
What statistics would be different? My understanding is that women very often take off work when they have young kids, or otherwise scale back their work. This is reflected in both the stats and my anecdotal experience -- which is admittedly in the South, but it still seems to be normative for middle-class women to take off work, even among the unchurched.
I think the pure homemaker is mostly gone, and very few women in the younger generations are truly talented homemakers. If you want a wife who is as talented a homemaker as your grandmother was, it's going to be a real longshot, and those skills are in high demand among other men.
This speaks to a thought I've had before, which is that part of the reason that young people aren't getting married, or even having sex with one another, is that both sexes are just plain less attractive to each another than they were in the past. This cuts both ways.
But I still don't think it's worth being that blackpilled about. It just means you need to adjust expectations downward on the homemaking front, but there's still a middle ground between a dedicated homemaker and a hard-driving careerist.
My overall point is that more men want homemaker wives and many women do not want to embrace that role.
Marriage rates are down 60% since 1970 and our country’s birth rate is 1.6 children below replacement.
Many women are deliberately delaying marriage and childbearing because they dread taking up their homemaker role. Statistics bear these facts.
I’m not talking about blackpills or redpills etc. The larger conversation is about the roles men and women expect the opposite sex to take in the context of family life.
Children want a mother at home. Period. Will they say that? No. But the decline in our culture and values is in direction correlation wtih the rise of feminism and visible socialism in our country.
Been reading alot of Vince E. Ellison lately after his interview with Tucker Carlson. The "Great Society" program incentizes women to work, not have a father in the home and pop out multiple children for tax credits. Look at the black community and tell me what the Civil Rights Movement did for them. How did it and the socialist/unChristian/womanizer/abuser MLK improve the lives of the black community? It didn't. It through them down the drain while 70+% of Planned Parenthood abortion mills are in low income black neighborhoods.
Women aren't taught the values and role of raising a family and taking care of a home. I work with one right now. She is a millenial who actually depises the idea of being a homemaker. Has one child expecting another who will be put in daycare (at least a Christian one). Older child has been acting up with obvious issues of wanting her mother at home. Mom is about to have a 5 month maternity leave (yes, you read that right. Out for 5 months while the rest of us have to pick up her work load). I told her "I predict (child's) behavior will improve once the new baby arrives and she is used to you being at home." I just got a deer in headlights look.
I greatly admire homemakers especially in our country today. It is almost looked down on as something lowly, but they have the toughest, but most ultimately rewarding job. I teach children and have for over 40 years. I can spot a stay at home mother's children with two (original) parents in a second. Add in homeschooling and those children are WONDERFUL to work with. Contrast with a 5 year old I worked with this year who was socially, verbally and developmentally behind. So different from the same age 20 years ago or even 10 years ago. He gets to watch the movies with the murderous teddy bear on YT regularlly telling me "I know I'm supposed to be scared, but it doesn't scare me."
Can't be much worse except for one thing, mom works in our local social work department.
" I told her 'I predict (child's) behavior will improve once the new baby arrives and she is used to you being at home.' I just got a deer in headlights look."
And no wonder. It's dirt-common for kids to act out once a younger sibling is born. What you see as your special insight into this particular mom's circumstances (your judgment that her kids suffer because she's not mothering them enough) doesn't really reduce the risk of that happening. She has no real reason to believe your prediction.
I think you're right that they dread the traditional homemaker role and becoming entirely economically reliant on a man, which is why few women fall into that role under the same terms their grandmothers did. But most women still want to get married and have children. And when they do, it's still common for them to elect to de-emphasize their careers.
I don't think you can blame the fertility collapse or the marriage collapse (which itself explains around half the post-2000 fertility collapse) entirely on women dreading homemaking and motherhood though. There are a lot of causes, many of which are hard to quantify. But one thing statistics DO show is that desired fertility has been much slower to decline than actual fertility.
I mentioned this in another reply but I think one of the main factors is economic. It used to be super common for a family of 4 to live off of the salary of the dad amongst the middle class but these days it has become harder and harder to meet financial responsibilities without both spouses working. Then considering the cost of childcare being so high, it makes sense why some are choosing to not have kids even if they might want to have kids.
Ryan, I am curious about Latinx/hispanic communities. Do they see the same large gaps like Black Protestants? Does it differ if they self identify as Protestant or Catholic? Just curious.
This is such an interesting subject! I’ve been thinking about the selective service + women for some time. And I think the issue reveals some tensions caused by the state’s obligation to protect equal rights and late-state capitalism. Or more broadly, democracy vs capitalism.
On the one hand, military service has been a traditional tool for upward social mobility. That tool has primarily been accessible to white men and it took time, even after desegregation of the military, for non-white men to access the benefits that create upward mobility (such as the GI Bill).
The same is true for women in the military. There are women who want to serve in combat roles and who have the skills, but are precluded from doing so because of their gender. I think it’s important for the military to not make assumptions about ability based on biology and to let individuals prove themselves. Let biology play out rather than pre-impose limits (don’t tell women what they can/can’t do. Enable them to show what they can do on an even playing field). This is doubly important because combat roles come with more pay/tax breaks, etc.
At the same time, others will argue that it is a national interest to keep women of reproductive age alive. I understand that in general, but we do not live in an era where military power is measured in numbers. A small footprint is better, nowadays.
I also think that if we’re so concerned about women reproducing to replenish the population, we should critically examine the pressures on women created by late-stage capitalism. Women should have more choice, not less, and providing more choice means providing more support and equal opportunity.
So ironically, I do think that the state drafting women is an inevitability. And Americans should think harder about why they have a draft — about American empire and needless foreign interventions and the militarization of society — rather than bemoan the extension of the draft to women because they should be in the home instead. Maybe neither American men nor women should be drafted at all.
"The one that is easily the most predictive, however, is Republican affiliation. It has a large coefficient than gender, church attendance, and being an evangelical."
Ryan, it would be very interesting if you return to this in 4 years to see if this holds true, or if any new nuances or wrinkles will be added to the twist. While you're looking at these data, we're concurrently witnessing Trump transforming the Republican party. If we can take a step back from the discourse about pro or anti Trump for a moment and observe objectively what's happening right now, the Republican base is changing before our eyes. Whatever else about Trump, he's hauling the Republican party into the 21st century. The Chamber of Commerce Republicans of the Bush and Romney types have long since been kicked to the curbs, and Nikki Haley's failed campaign was the nail in their coffin. Now, with their convention, the cultural conservatives are slowly being sidelined. As someone who neither love or hate Trump and officially independent, it's quite extraordinary to watch. I'm not even clear anymore what "conservative" means now anymore. But it's undeniable the Republican party has been taken over by a different set of people.
Of course, this new base is still traditional leaning. It's impossible to see right now how the dust will settle. The younger Republican pundits and those with platforms certainly still sound very traditional. (Again I refrain from "conservative" and "liberal" because the labels IMO have lost all their meanings.) I'm just not sure if there won't be some kind of synthesis of views when the Trump/Vance transformation of the Republican party is completed. Vance's wife certainly defies the traditional SAH wife model, and this woman may become the first lady when Trump is done. And then, what gives?
A really great essay about the 1st subject in this essay (regarding women & combat) is “‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” by Kameron Hurley.
Interesting! The PSID-CDS asked a similar question (women are much happier if they stay at home and take care of their children). A quick glance at 1997 and 2019 doesn’t show much change - 28% agreed/strongly agreed in 1997 vs 26% in 2019. But another question, mothers should not work full time if their child is younger than 5 years old, dropped from 39% agreement in 1997 to 23% in 2019. Whereas a caregiving question that wasn’t gendered (it is fine for children under 3 years of age to be care for all day in daycare) moved a bit but not as much as the full time question - from 49% agreement in 1997 to 53% in 2019.
Few notes. From the original graph, the dominance of women at home didn't last very long. Within a few years that was the minority composite opinion. These initial graphs have an inflection point, 1990. A start date of 1977 for data collection may have been to late. The entry of women into the workforce in large numbers also has an inflection point, the Nixon era when inflation high enough to freeze prices by Executive Order made it clear that two income households had an advantage over single income households. To this day, unless once spouse has a very high income, prosperity goes preferentially to the home with two wage earners. There was a time when men went to college to get a BA and Coeds enrolled to earn an MRS. Not been true for most of my adult lifetime.
This is also one theme where what you say you believe may not be coincident with behavior. I wonder how many of the advocates of men at home seek care from female doctors, have a woman do their taxes, and vote for the Republican woman. Moreover, those same people probably contribute to their own daughter's tuition and would like their daughters to have economic security in their own right when the marriage fails. Indeed, many of these advocates of single earner are in the groups of less social stability where marriages fail or struggling single moms challenge their churches' ministries. The advocates of women contributing to household incomes are the ones most highly employable through their education, something that also segregates with religious and political affiliation.
The hypothetical the poll posed, "if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of home and family", does not imply that those agreeing with it are "advocates of single earner" families, or preclude "women contributing to household incomes".
Being "the achiever" doesn't mean being the only one earning. It means being the one whose career is protected from interruption by the rest of the family in hopes of maximizing career achievement. Meanwhile, "tak[ing] care of home and family" isn't limited to unpaid domestic work, it just means being willing to forgo paid career advancement by taking on unpaid caregiving responsibilities.
Women can earn outside the home in many capacities while occupying the role of the family member who interrupts her own paid career in order to provide unpaid family care as needed, so that the men of the family don't have to jeopardize male career achievement with similar interruptions.
This is very interesting! Thank you for putting it together.
It also reminds us of the strengths and weaknesses of sociological survey data. It tells us true things about what people do and what people believe, but it cannot tell us what people SHOULD do/believe. Which, if any, of these answers is actually best for human flourishing?
To answer this question, and others like it, we need an ethical standard that is OUTSIDE ourselves. What does The God Who Made Us have to say on this subject? And when we find the answer to that question and then turn back to this data with this knowledge of God's Standard, what might it reveal to us about our modern society?
"Which, if any, of these answers is actually best for human flourishing?
"To answer this question, and others like it, we need an ethical standard that is OUTSIDE ourselves. What does The God Who Made Us have to say on this subject?"
Being religious myself, I'm not opposed to discerning God's calling. But maximizing families' well-being as an economic unit favors letting those who can have careers uninterrupted by childbearing and unpaid caregiving have them, letting unpaid caregiving of all sorts fall to those whose careers are already interrupted by childbearing.
Family members with uninterrupted careers are huge assets to the families they support. While some women, even traditionally-minded women, aren't slowed down by pregnancy and nursing, no woman can guarantee that's gonna be her till she's done having kids.
In a family whose men already lead chaotic lives, with frequent bouts of unemployment, women who interrupt paid work to bear children may still end up with resumes less interrupted than their menfolk, and so provide better for their family if they work outside the home. But in a family where everyone, male and female, shares about the same *moral* commitment to steady work, protecting the careers of those whose careers aren't already interrupted by childbearing from being interrupted by other unpaid caregiving, makes sense.
The problem with relying on God, on the other hand, is that God calls people not just by their demographic characteristics, but as individuals, including calling individual women to something other than a typical homemaking role.
There is a sense in which the gap for mainline Protestants between men and women is actually larger than that of blacks. If you’re viewing it by a percentage of each other, the difference is is almost 100%.
I would think marital status is relevant here too -- is there data to evaluate that? Divorced women and single mothers are going to be the demographics most likely to disagree with traditional gender roles (i.e., those who tell their daughters, "You can never rely on a man.")
I wonder how much of the black Protestant gap can be explained by marital status. I would guess that most churchgoing black Protestant men are married and most of the women are not. Perhaps even a majority of the women are single mothers (or were in their youth).
Differing role expectations between men and women makes it difficult for marriages to form among those who want to adhere to traditional sex roles.
It’s arguably much easier for men and women who want dual-income marriages and who are ok with daycare/nannies to find and marry each other.
I think a factor that a lot of people aren’t mentioning is that it’s just not financially feasible to only have one parent working anymore for a large number of Americans.
Not just a factor, probably THE major factor for the vast majority of us...and probably/possibly a factor in the drop in marriage rates in the US...and probably globally too...too.
Sure. Though in my experience, people often fall into the traditional roles as they learn more about life and themselves. I don't think that what people say here is always an indication of how they will end up living their lives.
And on the other side, I'll be honest, while I'm traditional-minded, I would probably be OK with being a stay-at-home, homeschooling dad. I never would have thought that before I had kids, but now I just wish I had the time to teach them everything I would like to teach them, and it turns out I don't.
I think the issue here is that many women do not want to be homemakers and the men who are looking for homemaker wives just need to look much much harder than before.
I’m not entirely convinced that many people grow into their traditional sex roles as they get older. We’d see different statistics if that was the case.
Feminism has been the driving force for what has influenced women the past 60 years.
True....and the influence/impact has grown exponentially, too. Not just in the US/western nations but globally.
I think of it (feminism) as Humpty Dumpty's "egg" (that shot heard round the world) and/or the genie that can't be put back in the bottle.
What statistics would be different? My understanding is that women very often take off work when they have young kids, or otherwise scale back their work. This is reflected in both the stats and my anecdotal experience -- which is admittedly in the South, but it still seems to be normative for middle-class women to take off work, even among the unchurched.
I think the pure homemaker is mostly gone, and very few women in the younger generations are truly talented homemakers. If you want a wife who is as talented a homemaker as your grandmother was, it's going to be a real longshot, and those skills are in high demand among other men.
This speaks to a thought I've had before, which is that part of the reason that young people aren't getting married, or even having sex with one another, is that both sexes are just plain less attractive to each another than they were in the past. This cuts both ways.
But I still don't think it's worth being that blackpilled about. It just means you need to adjust expectations downward on the homemaking front, but there's still a middle ground between a dedicated homemaker and a hard-driving careerist.
My overall point is that more men want homemaker wives and many women do not want to embrace that role.
Marriage rates are down 60% since 1970 and our country’s birth rate is 1.6 children below replacement.
Many women are deliberately delaying marriage and childbearing because they dread taking up their homemaker role. Statistics bear these facts.
I’m not talking about blackpills or redpills etc. The larger conversation is about the roles men and women expect the opposite sex to take in the context of family life.
Children want a mother at home. Period. Will they say that? No. But the decline in our culture and values is in direction correlation wtih the rise of feminism and visible socialism in our country.
Been reading alot of Vince E. Ellison lately after his interview with Tucker Carlson. The "Great Society" program incentizes women to work, not have a father in the home and pop out multiple children for tax credits. Look at the black community and tell me what the Civil Rights Movement did for them. How did it and the socialist/unChristian/womanizer/abuser MLK improve the lives of the black community? It didn't. It through them down the drain while 70+% of Planned Parenthood abortion mills are in low income black neighborhoods.
Women aren't taught the values and role of raising a family and taking care of a home. I work with one right now. She is a millenial who actually depises the idea of being a homemaker. Has one child expecting another who will be put in daycare (at least a Christian one). Older child has been acting up with obvious issues of wanting her mother at home. Mom is about to have a 5 month maternity leave (yes, you read that right. Out for 5 months while the rest of us have to pick up her work load). I told her "I predict (child's) behavior will improve once the new baby arrives and she is used to you being at home." I just got a deer in headlights look.
I greatly admire homemakers especially in our country today. It is almost looked down on as something lowly, but they have the toughest, but most ultimately rewarding job. I teach children and have for over 40 years. I can spot a stay at home mother's children with two (original) parents in a second. Add in homeschooling and those children are WONDERFUL to work with. Contrast with a 5 year old I worked with this year who was socially, verbally and developmentally behind. So different from the same age 20 years ago or even 10 years ago. He gets to watch the movies with the murderous teddy bear on YT regularlly telling me "I know I'm supposed to be scared, but it doesn't scare me."
Can't be much worse except for one thing, mom works in our local social work department.
I’m honestly impressed that you managed to fit so many different prejudicial views into one comment.
" I told her 'I predict (child's) behavior will improve once the new baby arrives and she is used to you being at home.' I just got a deer in headlights look."
And no wonder. It's dirt-common for kids to act out once a younger sibling is born. What you see as your special insight into this particular mom's circumstances (your judgment that her kids suffer because she's not mothering them enough) doesn't really reduce the risk of that happening. She has no real reason to believe your prediction.
I think you're right that they dread the traditional homemaker role and becoming entirely economically reliant on a man, which is why few women fall into that role under the same terms their grandmothers did. But most women still want to get married and have children. And when they do, it's still common for them to elect to de-emphasize their careers.
I don't think you can blame the fertility collapse or the marriage collapse (which itself explains around half the post-2000 fertility collapse) entirely on women dreading homemaking and motherhood though. There are a lot of causes, many of which are hard to quantify. But one thing statistics DO show is that desired fertility has been much slower to decline than actual fertility.
I mentioned this in another reply but I think one of the main factors is economic. It used to be super common for a family of 4 to live off of the salary of the dad amongst the middle class but these days it has become harder and harder to meet financial responsibilities without both spouses working. Then considering the cost of childcare being so high, it makes sense why some are choosing to not have kids even if they might want to have kids.
Define desired fertility, please.
Not a snark question...honest.
Has anyone done any reading/research in "incels"/the incel movement?
Not an issue for women...to my knowledge.
Revelatory my reading was for social historian me.
What does blackpilled mean, please.
Despairing, usually about some broader social/political trend (it follows from redpill/bluepill/whitepill)
Ryan, I am curious about Latinx/hispanic communities. Do they see the same large gaps like Black Protestants? Does it differ if they self identify as Protestant or Catholic? Just curious.
Please don't butcher my native language by calling us "Latinx".
This is such an interesting subject! I’ve been thinking about the selective service + women for some time. And I think the issue reveals some tensions caused by the state’s obligation to protect equal rights and late-state capitalism. Or more broadly, democracy vs capitalism.
On the one hand, military service has been a traditional tool for upward social mobility. That tool has primarily been accessible to white men and it took time, even after desegregation of the military, for non-white men to access the benefits that create upward mobility (such as the GI Bill).
The same is true for women in the military. There are women who want to serve in combat roles and who have the skills, but are precluded from doing so because of their gender. I think it’s important for the military to not make assumptions about ability based on biology and to let individuals prove themselves. Let biology play out rather than pre-impose limits (don’t tell women what they can/can’t do. Enable them to show what they can do on an even playing field). This is doubly important because combat roles come with more pay/tax breaks, etc.
At the same time, others will argue that it is a national interest to keep women of reproductive age alive. I understand that in general, but we do not live in an era where military power is measured in numbers. A small footprint is better, nowadays.
I also think that if we’re so concerned about women reproducing to replenish the population, we should critically examine the pressures on women created by late-stage capitalism. Women should have more choice, not less, and providing more choice means providing more support and equal opportunity.
So ironically, I do think that the state drafting women is an inevitability. And Americans should think harder about why they have a draft — about American empire and needless foreign interventions and the militarization of society — rather than bemoan the extension of the draft to women because they should be in the home instead. Maybe neither American men nor women should be drafted at all.
"The one that is easily the most predictive, however, is Republican affiliation. It has a large coefficient than gender, church attendance, and being an evangelical."
Ryan, it would be very interesting if you return to this in 4 years to see if this holds true, or if any new nuances or wrinkles will be added to the twist. While you're looking at these data, we're concurrently witnessing Trump transforming the Republican party. If we can take a step back from the discourse about pro or anti Trump for a moment and observe objectively what's happening right now, the Republican base is changing before our eyes. Whatever else about Trump, he's hauling the Republican party into the 21st century. The Chamber of Commerce Republicans of the Bush and Romney types have long since been kicked to the curbs, and Nikki Haley's failed campaign was the nail in their coffin. Now, with their convention, the cultural conservatives are slowly being sidelined. As someone who neither love or hate Trump and officially independent, it's quite extraordinary to watch. I'm not even clear anymore what "conservative" means now anymore. But it's undeniable the Republican party has been taken over by a different set of people.
Of course, this new base is still traditional leaning. It's impossible to see right now how the dust will settle. The younger Republican pundits and those with platforms certainly still sound very traditional. (Again I refrain from "conservative" and "liberal" because the labels IMO have lost all their meanings.) I'm just not sure if there won't be some kind of synthesis of views when the Trump/Vance transformation of the Republican party is completed. Vance's wife certainly defies the traditional SAH wife model, and this woman may become the first lady when Trump is done. And then, what gives?
Like your insights.
A really great essay about the 1st subject in this essay (regarding women & combat) is “‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” by Kameron Hurley.
Only? F…ck No
This was in response to??????
Not being snarky, really can't figure out the posting.
Interesting! The PSID-CDS asked a similar question (women are much happier if they stay at home and take care of their children). A quick glance at 1997 and 2019 doesn’t show much change - 28% agreed/strongly agreed in 1997 vs 26% in 2019. But another question, mothers should not work full time if their child is younger than 5 years old, dropped from 39% agreement in 1997 to 23% in 2019. Whereas a caregiving question that wasn’t gendered (it is fine for children under 3 years of age to be care for all day in daycare) moved a bit but not as much as the full time question - from 49% agreement in 1997 to 53% in 2019.
Few notes. From the original graph, the dominance of women at home didn't last very long. Within a few years that was the minority composite opinion. These initial graphs have an inflection point, 1990. A start date of 1977 for data collection may have been to late. The entry of women into the workforce in large numbers also has an inflection point, the Nixon era when inflation high enough to freeze prices by Executive Order made it clear that two income households had an advantage over single income households. To this day, unless once spouse has a very high income, prosperity goes preferentially to the home with two wage earners. There was a time when men went to college to get a BA and Coeds enrolled to earn an MRS. Not been true for most of my adult lifetime.
This is also one theme where what you say you believe may not be coincident with behavior. I wonder how many of the advocates of men at home seek care from female doctors, have a woman do their taxes, and vote for the Republican woman. Moreover, those same people probably contribute to their own daughter's tuition and would like their daughters to have economic security in their own right when the marriage fails. Indeed, many of these advocates of single earner are in the groups of less social stability where marriages fail or struggling single moms challenge their churches' ministries. The advocates of women contributing to household incomes are the ones most highly employable through their education, something that also segregates with religious and political affiliation.
The hypothetical the poll posed, "if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of home and family", does not imply that those agreeing with it are "advocates of single earner" families, or preclude "women contributing to household incomes".
Being "the achiever" doesn't mean being the only one earning. It means being the one whose career is protected from interruption by the rest of the family in hopes of maximizing career achievement. Meanwhile, "tak[ing] care of home and family" isn't limited to unpaid domestic work, it just means being willing to forgo paid career advancement by taking on unpaid caregiving responsibilities.
Women can earn outside the home in many capacities while occupying the role of the family member who interrupts her own paid career in order to provide unpaid family care as needed, so that the men of the family don't have to jeopardize male career achievement with similar interruptions.
This is very interesting! Thank you for putting it together.
It also reminds us of the strengths and weaknesses of sociological survey data. It tells us true things about what people do and what people believe, but it cannot tell us what people SHOULD do/believe. Which, if any, of these answers is actually best for human flourishing?
To answer this question, and others like it, we need an ethical standard that is OUTSIDE ourselves. What does The God Who Made Us have to say on this subject? And when we find the answer to that question and then turn back to this data with this knowledge of God's Standard, what might it reveal to us about our modern society?
"Which, if any, of these answers is actually best for human flourishing?
"To answer this question, and others like it, we need an ethical standard that is OUTSIDE ourselves. What does The God Who Made Us have to say on this subject?"
Being religious myself, I'm not opposed to discerning God's calling. But maximizing families' well-being as an economic unit favors letting those who can have careers uninterrupted by childbearing and unpaid caregiving have them, letting unpaid caregiving of all sorts fall to those whose careers are already interrupted by childbearing.
Family members with uninterrupted careers are huge assets to the families they support. While some women, even traditionally-minded women, aren't slowed down by pregnancy and nursing, no woman can guarantee that's gonna be her till she's done having kids.
In a family whose men already lead chaotic lives, with frequent bouts of unemployment, women who interrupt paid work to bear children may still end up with resumes less interrupted than their menfolk, and so provide better for their family if they work outside the home. But in a family where everyone, male and female, shares about the same *moral* commitment to steady work, protecting the careers of those whose careers aren't already interrupted by childbearing from being interrupted by other unpaid caregiving, makes sense.
The problem with relying on God, on the other hand, is that God calls people not just by their demographic characteristics, but as individuals, including calling individual women to something other than a typical homemaking role.
Well said.
There is a sense in which the gap for mainline Protestants between men and women is actually larger than that of blacks. If you’re viewing it by a percentage of each other, the difference is is almost 100%.