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> fill the empty shoes of a missing full-time wife and mom because there are more two career couples and both spouses now "need a wife" and it can't be found.

> fill the empty shoes of a missing full-time wife and mom because there are more two career couples and both spouses now "need a wife" and it can't be found. This can be true when one person is the breadwinner and the other is practically/partially disabled, too. I don't know if you've read this book, but it is fascinating. https://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/0465098835/ https://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/046509... Of course, this book isn't the be-all answer to how things really were. I would suggest what we're really grappling with here is a breakdown in social order where kids are adequately taken care of, houses are adequately cleaned, meals prepared. To do so today is really quite hard: all sorts of traditional support structures have vanished in the wind. The big bugbear in this from a century ago was "Modernity", and you can find a number of writings from that era wishing for a prior time. I'm reluctant to blame modernity that much, but it's a worthy starting point in my opinion.

Mz 9y ago
I am not familiar with that book, but I am well aware that our mental models about the nuclear family are basically rooted in a very brief window of time when "The Boys" came home from WW2 and women went home en masse to be homemakers etc. I actually blog some about the truly terrible effect this has had on our housing situation because we are still basically being haunted by the ghost of this brief anomalous time that we think is normal or something. I think it gets romanticized because it was a step up generally speaking over the terrible poverty that was the norm before that. People seem to not recognize that fact, so it usually isn't worth trying to comment on.
- pnathan 9y ago
  I'd be interested in links to your blog. I have been persuaded for a number of years now that the 35-year World War broke Western civilization thoroughly and deeply, with an interregnum to ensure a whole generation and its children got the hit, and only in the past, say, 20 years have scholars been able to get enough distance from it to look critically enough to remark with equanimity on the matter. To me, it is sufficient to look at the evolution of fine art to demonstrate the point. But one can also look at complexity of language usage by educated individuals over time, social cohesion, pride in civilization, historical knowledge by educated individuals, etc.
  - Mz 9y ago
    I don't have a blog specifically dedicated to that subject, but I touch on it some here: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html And here: http://projectsro.blogspot.com/p/about.html http://projectsro.blogspot.com/p/about.html

Mz 9y ago

I am not familiar with that book, but I am well aware that our mental models about the nuclear family are basically rooted in a very brief window of time when "The Boys" came home from WW2 and women went home en masse to be homemakers etc. I actually blog some about the truly terrible effect this has had on our housing situation because we are still basically being haunted by the ghost of this brief anomalous time that we think is normal or something. I think it gets romanticized because it was a step up generally speaking over the terrible poverty that was the norm before that. People seem to not recognize that fact, so it usually isn't worth trying to comment on.

pnathan 9y ago
I'd be interested in links to your blog. I have been persuaded for a number of years now that the 35-year World War broke Western civilization thoroughly and deeply, with an interregnum to ensure a whole generation and its children got the hit, and only in the past, say, 20 years have scholars been able to get enough distance from it to look critically enough to remark with equanimity on the matter. To me, it is sufficient to look at the evolution of fine art to demonstrate the point. But one can also look at complexity of language usage by educated individuals over time, social cohesion, pride in civilization, historical knowledge by educated individuals, etc.
- Mz 9y ago
  I don't have a blog specifically dedicated to that subject, but I touch on it some here: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html And here: http://projectsro.blogspot.com/p/about.html http://projectsro.blogspot.com/p/about.html