somone brought the point of Europe , In France, men still benefit from privileges inherited from long-standing tradition : For equal work, they still earn 20% more than women. Men assume only 20% of household tasks and caring for children, the ill and the elderly in families. They hold 90% of the seats in Parliament. Male violence is not even called just that. It is part of the established order in our patriarchal society, to such an extent that it goes unseen. Yet, at least two million men in this country beat their wives or girlfriends. "Male chauvinism kills every day, feminism has never killed anyone." (Benoît Groult) and I find the following article somewhat interesting as well Don were U inspired by the following article and started your research or is it just the coincidence! Thursday, August 24, 2006 Don't marry career women That's the advice Forbes.com's Michael Noer gives to men in a controversial web column (published here, along with an unconvincing rebuttal by a female colleague who found his piece "frightening.") Noer cites a number of social-science studies finding that two-career marriages are more likely to be unhappy and troubled than traditional arrangements. Writes Noer: While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women--even those with a "feminist" outlook--are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner. Elizabeth Corcoran doesn't try to refute the statistics, but only asserts that she and her husband have raised two kids in a happy marriage of 18 years. Well, okay, but that only means that the Corcorans beat the odds, which are stacked against couples like them. Noer admits that these findings can be hard on career men to take, because they're naturally drawn to the intellectual excitement of being around career women. From my experience, that's true. But see, I'm lucky: I married an educated, intellectual career girl who wanted to leave the workforce to look after the children when they begin coming along. From my experience -- and I write about this in "Crunchy Cons" -- I can't imagine the stress that would be on my family if Julie had a standard job. And seeing how much it matters to our boys (and yes, to their father) that there's a mom at home with the kids, keeping things in order, cooking, taking them to karate, etc. -- well, I can't imagine how different our lives together, and yes, how relatively impoverished they would be, if Julie were a salaried employee instead of a stay-at-home mom. In "Crunchy Cons," I quote Julie explaining why she had "no doubts at all" that she would leave the career world to raise kids: "My mom was home with us till I was fifteen, and then she went back to work because she had to. She was really involved with everything we did in school. Once she went back to work, I saw the massive difference, all the stress she was under trying to work and do the same things for us kids." she said. "As a mother myself, I can look back and see how often my brother and I asked way more of her than we should have. As the child, I experience the stress it placed on us, and was old enough to see the stress it placed on her as a mother, and I didn't want any part of either one." Julie said that the only thing that separated her, a New York City career girl in her twenties choosing to leave work to be a stay-at-home mom, and all the other women like her, was faith. "I was lucky that I met the man I was meant to marry early on, and I always had total confidence that our marriage was going to work. I wonder sometimes if a lot of women who work are doing it because they worry that their husbands won't be there for them. This is where faith comes in. I have faith in you because we share the same vision of what life is all about." What she meant was that she knew that I believed, as she did, that marriage is forever, and that we both shared the same traditionalist convictions about how a family should work. So neither one of us had unrealistic expectations, and both of us thought of the family as an organism, not a contract arrangement. In the end, we choose to live traditionally because we are convinced that that's what's best for our children, which is the main point of marriage: to do right by the kids. Because we do the best we can within our means to put our kids and their needs first, it becomes relatively easy to make this arrangement work. I'm really lucky that I ended up with a woman who is interested in many of the same things I am, and who loves to read and talk about books and ideas. So I don't have the trade-off that Noer sees, namely between an intellectually engaging career woman, and a boring homemaker. In fact, we know lots of traditionalist young couples in which the wife stays home to look after the kids, and in every case the woman is the intellectual equal of her husband. That Noer even thinks in terms of this (false) dichotomy betrays a commonly-held bias about modernity: that the more educated and intellectually advanced you are, the less interested you are bound to be in traditional social arrangements, traditional religion, and so forth. It may well be true as a statistical matter, at least in the US, but it isn't a Law of Existence. Quite a few educated men and women have used their smarts to discern that our ancestors really were on to something, and that what we take to be progress is actually regressive in important ways. Besides, as Daniel Larison sensibly asks, putting things into perspective, "Are we talking about creating a marriage and a family, or are we setting up a debating society?" posted by Crunchy Con @ 3:30 PM |