A reader writes:
Posts like this are why the Dish remains at the top of my newsfeed. I'd call it the evolution of happiness: evolving at all times, and not created falsely by impositions of ideology. Happiness cannot be designed nor predicted. It has to evolve from the bottom up, and it's an inescapable part of life. Everything in the universe is created from the bottom up, and the passage of time will always (eventually!) trample anything that tries to oppose that flow.
Another writes:
Nice essay, but it should at least touch on the rise of men being productive at home – filling the role of housewife. You represent such men as just "mooching off parents or working wives or partners," but the ones I know are playing a crucial role in supporting their wife's career and caring for kids or step-kids. As a feminist, I want more men to see that as an option, and I don't want that represented as laziness.
Agreed. That's a real factor, and I only glancingly acknowledged it. Another:
I would have expected you to spend a bit more time and text pondering what women have to say about why women are having children alone.
As you might imagine, there are many who are tackling the issue. A comprehensive piece from the November Atlantic does a great job uncovering the complexities at work. I'm working on my own white paper regarding the rise of the single woman.
My take? It's incredibly disheartening that men are falling behind, even as women are opening doors for themselves. I do think a driving force in all of this is the devaluation (or even disdain) of what has traditionally been "women's work." While women haven't been ashamed or reluctant to take on the traditionally male worlds of, well – every profession that affords a decent living (aside from the world's oldest profession, of course) – men have been unwilling to expand their options to consider things like childcare, nursing, teaching, and the like. This is what undervaluing the work of women for the past century has wrought.
I'm sure we'll course-correct, especially as the next generation of men will have been raised by incredibly capable, empowered women, but I can't imagine the price we'll all pay in the short term.
As a woman who was raised working-class but had the opportunity to attend elite universities and graduate schools (what a snob, right?), I feel I've got fairly good insight into a couple subsets of women. For those in the highly educated group, we were raised to believe we shouldn't "settle" for a man who doesn't take our breath away, and that we should be sufficiently successful to not "need" a man for economic support, so we waited. And waited. And waited.
I've had many friends who explored single motherhood because they reached their mid-late 30s and the "right guy" just never happened. On the working-class end, frankly there just aren't many men around who would provide a great economic support (which would be needed), and many weren't raised to believe that childcare should be their role. So what exactly are they bringing to the table?
As I write that, I'm sure it could come across as man-bashing. It's not; I think there are few things in life better than having a great partner (my preference is men), and I hope this "gender crisis" resolves quickly. But these are the realities that women today are facing. It ain't pretty.
The Dish recently spotlighted women who prefer to be solo parents.
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