Letters to the Editor
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Several thoughts
I think there are several issues going on here, and I think finger-pointing isn't constructive, unless it's aimed at ourselves.
1. Overall, we demand a very high standard of living. We insist on home ownership, the kinds of cars that require payments, new clothes every year for the adults as well as growing children, regular meals out. Our parents and grandparents might not have had two full-time working adults in the house, but they didn't always have these things, either.
I actually remember when my parents bought their first house, and when my father took on his first car payment. They didn't start their family after these things happened, which is what we expect of people now.
2. Women's work isn't valued. It's insisted upon and taken for granted by a certain segment of the male population, but that's different from being valued. It's also sneered at by women who don't do it themselves. End result? Nobody wants to do it. Frankly the reason I can get away with being as domestic as I am is because I'm a single mother, not a wife. When I tried this stuff as a wife, I was treated like crap.
Saved money, in our collective heads, is worth significantly less than earned money. It's even worth less than spent money. This is a huge, huge problem.
3. Corporations are in place to serve shareholders, not customers or employees, and companies that don't play ball get bad press even when they're profitable.
4. We have it in our heads that nobody should have any comfort or perks unless they're somehow a victim. As a culture, we are unkind unless we're acting out of pity. We think it's okay to make people work 60 - 80 hours a week--unless there's some kind of catastrophic mitigating circumstance. Problem is, it makes everyone else envious and distracts all involved from the real point: no one should be required to work that much. Period. It's not even very productive. It's just busy. Productive and busy are two different things.
There's undoubtedly more, but that's what I can think of at the moment.
Women do make a convenient scapegoat on stuff like this, though. If I remember correctly, we're responsible for every societal ill. Sadly, this was also true before feminism, so I don't think feminism can be blamed. I just think it's sad that feminism wasn't able to correct it.
I'm starting to think that nothing every will.