What Do Women Want - Road to the Middle Class

THE FEMINISTS don’t want to hear it, according to Megan Basham, but married women are trickling out of the workforce. And it’s because they don’t want to work full-time.

Only 21 percent of working mothers report a preference for a 40+-hour work week, while only 16 percent of at-home moms say the same.

What could be driving this? Feminists say it’s the post 9/11 economy.

Rather than admit the obvious, that women increasingly favor cutting back their careers when their children are young, some feminists are employing their own brand of voodoo economics. Women aren’t opting out, they’re being pushed out, they say.

There is this idea out there that working for a living, having a brilliant career, is the reason for living. Sorry to rain on the parade but it ain’t so.

Men work mainly so that they can get access to women. Down the ages, women have preferred monogamy, and they have preferred men that didn’t look like losers—in short, men with jobs. So men figure that they’d better get a job.

High status women, the ones that men fight over, are a different proposition. Men with a taste for them need more than a job; they need a fortune, or a fortunate political career.

Women work because... Yes why do women go out to work? Many women work because they have to. Always have, always will. But we are talking about the upper-class feminist ladies, women like the First Feminist Simone de Beauvoir and Second Feminist Betty Friedan. What they wanted was liberation, liberation from the fundamental work of women, which is, of course the only really important work in the world, the work of generation.

But a generation after the intoxication of the Second Wave of feminism many women are finding that the most important thing in their lives is children—their children. So they are asking themselves why they are out in the world working themselves to exhaustion when all they can think about is their children.

It’s a good point.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.