One thing that's worth remembering is that more of the economic production used to happen on the home scale. Cottage industries, such as weaving, used to be a huge industry during the middle ages. Much of that disappeared during the industrial revolution, and it's progressed ever since. Americans could let it persist longer than Europe because we had a huge continent to settle and a large portion of our population engaged in agriculture. What this meant was that women did indeed work, as did the kids, and the wife was the boss over them. The male sometimes worked outside the home, sometimes at the home, depending on profession and economic circumstances. It was a bit more along the lines of male, high risk high reward, female low risk low reward.
The pattern of the 50's style housewife was created by a newly rich postwar America emulating the leisure style of the upper class, as well as a bit of inertia from having the productive tasks taken over by machines. Consider when you are tossing clothes into the washing machine that it used to take hours to manually scrub clothes on a washboard; wood stoves required constant tending for a long period; manually sewing or weaving used to be extremely slow, and on and on. You'll notice this when you harvest the garden, and spend hours upon hours processing food, and realize how nice it is to only spend a few bucks for a large pack of frozen veggies. Machines reduce labor.
The problems with that model is that it requires a high degree of social trust, and it requires society to be industrious and stable. For example, if a lot of your food comes from the store rather than your garden and kitchen, you have to trust the food manufacturers to have your health in mind when they cook it, but a glance at the nutrition label will tell you they don't. They put sugar in everything, and advertise negatives as a positive, even the supposed health food brands. A second and even more important example would be public schools. Public schools were never great, but now they've become total indoctrination centers with no redeeming value. The only reason for going to them is economic necessity, cultural inertia, and denial over their true nature. The second criteria, an industrious and stable society, basically refers to a nation living on its own industry, rather than financial wizardry. If the economy isn't grounded in something rational, irrational pursuits take over, like having the largest most fertile agriculture region on the planet importing most of it's food, sending it's factories overseas, and importing labor to do menial tasks while making the best paying jobs be exclusively desk jobs. In that "economy" no one needs to be rational, so of course feel good nonsense will take over the workplace. It's already taken over the world.
So as I see it, the breakdown in family life is more the symptom than the cause of social decay. Amongst the lower classes, women have had to work outside the home for far longer than the middle and upper classes. Yet by far the more socially conservative people have been lower class followed by middle, then upper. In my opinion, it's not bored office women trying to date rappers or join OnlyFans, but instead it's the girl who's gotten 12 years straight of learning that MLK Jr. was the greatest Saint who ever lived (though maybe George Floyd is now) and learning that if she doesn't put out she isn't cool. She's learned from years of bitter childless harpies (teachers) that having children is a trap, and she'd be so much happier if she was a lesbian like them (plus, white kids are bad for the environment, just adopt a negro). Just like computers: garbage in, garbage out.
I appreciate the really great commentary. I'll respond when I get a little bit more time today. You make several important points.
Follow up: Mary Phagan and lots of other young women worked at a pencil factory with a very wealthy and powerful owner. In spite of that, she had no interest in sleeping with him, even though she probably could have earned more in 5 minutes than she did in a month. So her perverted boss withheld her paycheck to lure her in on a Saturday, attempted to rape her, then murdered her. She was 12, as were most of her co-workers. The ADL turned this man into their patron saint, which today calls the shots in much of the education system.
All of these young girls worked outside the home, yet they still were virtuous in much worse circumstances than most people have today. The difference is most went to church, and few went to school.
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