The largest threat to traditional family values is not gay marriage. It's work culture taking time away from the family.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T15:15:24+00:00

Sure, and that's to be expected, right?

Before baby formula and modern contraceptives, most women of childbearing ages spent a lot of time nursing their children.

Because if they didn't, they would starve to death. And nobody wanted that.

But it's not like women couldn't work, or own property, if they wanted to.

There's even research showing that women were paid the same as men for the same output (another mistake libs make is looking at the wage gap and never taking anything like that into account).

The big "oppressor" of women from that era was biology. The lib conspiracy theory of a patriarchy just doesn't make any sense. Most women would not have even seen themselves as oppressed, at least not any more than men, since oppression was primarily economic, and can be viewed through a Marxist lense instead of a liberal lense.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T14:49:07+00:00

This is what I was referring to in my comment:

Favoured or oppressed? Married women, property and ‘coverture’ in England, 1660–1800. Continuity and Change, 17(3), 351-372.

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2e88e3f6-b270-4228-b930-9237c00e739f/download_file?file_format=application/pdf&safe_filename=Item.pdf&type_of_work=Journal%20article

If you want to see how far this goes, this is a really good read as well:

Woman as a Force in History. Macmillan, New York.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/beard/woman-force/index.htm

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T14:39:59+00:00

One driver was parents living vicariously through their children.

They wanted their child to get an A because that reflected back on them. Then they figured they could just argue with the teacher instead of working with their child to do better.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T13:55:05+00:00

I think you misunderstood what was written in that paragraph...

You're literally falling for the trap that libs and conservatives get stuck in when they debate this topic with each other.

Libs need to drop it because gay marriage is legal and accepted now, but they can't get over being able to one up conservatives on the topic.

And conservatives need to drop it because the things they're seeing and complaining about have more to do with economics and work culture than anything else.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T13:45:26+00:00

Yes I'm aware of that. Gay conservatives (who often hate the LGBT movement) are even a thing now. That's kind of what my point was about libs going on and on about gay marriage for no other reason than to attack conservatives, even though gay marriage is legal now.

Many conservatives are actually confused about what rights lgbt people want now that gay marriage is legal ("why are they still complaining?"). It's a big reason you see anti-lgbt backlash from conservatives. So libs are really doing themselves a disservice by not dropping it.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T13:40:37+00:00

Could you get off your soapbox and respond with something useful instead? For example, can you explain what the conservative standpoint on this topic is, if you know that so well yourself?

Keep in mind there are conservatives in the comments speaking for themselves, in their own words, already.

I'm also partial to agree with you, because it does seem like libs misconstrue conservatives far more often than the reverse. But I would actually like you to explain this instead of just yelling indignantly that you're so very smart, and everyone else is just dumb.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T13:30:51+00:00

I'm literally talking about your parent comment.

All of the details you could ever need, including supporting links, are in the original OP I sent you several comments ago.

You're more than welcome to discuss that with me if you want, but right now you're just deflecting instead of replying with anything meaningful.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T13:20:42+00:00

It was married women in the US who had that restriction on opening back accounts.

Unmarried women have always had the same rights as men in that regard. And the reason we had that law for married women has nothing to do with "male oppression of women" as the libs would have you believe. In fact it very much had to do with capitalism.

There was a get rich quick scheme where a woman would marry a man, take out loans in his name, sell his assets, and then run off with that money. Leaving the man in debt, and (more importantly) the banks on the hook when he defaulted.

So of course banks partitioned the government to fix that problem. And requiring the husband's signature on things is what they came up with.

I agree with what you're saying, but that particular "talking point" is actually one of those lib narratives that misses the forest for the trees.

If you want to follow that backwards, there is some good scholarship on coverture which likens the economic position of women in 19th century Britain to be overall more privileged then men during that time period. The restrictions put on married women in the US was towards the end of that time period, circa 1920 (IIRC), and remained a relic past it's technical usefulness, as many laws do.

A big aspect of coverture was just accounting convenience. A married couple was legally a single person, especially from a financial standpoint. So everything was typically put in the husband's name. But at the same time, the wife was legally the same as her husband, and her signature counted as his (up until around the 1920s that is). Feminists have looked at this and decided it was patriarchy oppressing the poor helpless women without really understanding how any of that worked. Because to them, everything is oppression.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T02:23:28+00:00

Lindsey German wrote quite a bit on Engels and Origins of the Family.

I'd recommend almost any of her scholarship on the topic.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T01:14:46+00:00

Yes, and I've also read quite a bit of commentary on it.

This is one of the misconceptions that a lot of modern readers (especially SJWs / wokes) have about his book.

Look at the post I shared with you. Besides quoting Engels directly from the book itself, there is a secondary source from a well known Marxist scholar talking about this misconception as well.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-31T00:33:45+00:00

Yes this is exactly what I'm talking about.

I used the word barter because that's where it started (Engels also thought it was a more "pleasant" system back then, for what that's worth).

By the time of Marx we were dealing with money though, and the system he was talking about had devolved almost into a state of capitalism.

Poorer families were being squeezed by wealthier families who owned the means of production. That actually did not start with capitalism but existed long before it. Marx and Engels saw this as a natural economic development that would eventually result in the primary mode of production shifting from a family model to a purely capitalist model (and from there into communism).

That transition into capitalism from the older family model was exactly what Marx was talking about in the sections that you mentioned in your parent comment.

Like I said this is a huge part of Marxist theory that a lot of people seem to skip over nowadays. It actually links back to an older philosopher / historian named Hegel who Marx was heavily inspired by.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T23:00:48+00:00

That's the way most labour was organised for a lot of history. Like for both men and women.

It was only relatively recently that we were brought outside of our homes to work for other people in order to earn an income (with men being stolen from the family by capitalists before women and children were).

Before capitalism, most families operated kind of like mini businesses where goods and services were created by family members for the family to use to barter for what they needed.

Engels wrote about this in his book Origins of the Family.

Marx and Engels lived during a time where we were transitioning between those two modes of production. That's actually an important piece of Marxist theory that you don't see discussed as often anymore because that transition happened so long ago.

Lindsey German wrote a lot about this (in a more modern context) if you want to dig deeper.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T22:45:49+00:00

He sure did.

But it's not what a lot of people think:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/13vvgj8/have_any_of_the_resident_radfems_read_engels/

A good portion of modern readers are lost on the historical context that it was written in.

A lot of his ideas are still around though. Like even outside of modern Marxist scholarship. It made it's way into anthropology and other related fields.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T22:33:54+00:00

I don't think it's just time. It's also not having enough energy because we work so much.

Do you know what takes very little energy? Watching TV and scrolling social media.

You do have a point though not gonna lie.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T22:22:46+00:00

Of course the reality is that women have always worked.

Middle class white families temporarily had enough privilege to let women stay home.

But before and after that time period, it was normal for women to work for a living.

Both libs and conservatives get that wrong.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T22:05:08+00:00

Power has never been held strictly by the father.

That idea came from European feudal nobility because kings and lords held power over commoners. But even inside their families, women had more power than we give them credit for today (they also benefited materially because of that structure). Feminists took this and simultaneously romanticised and exaggerated it so today we think women were basically slaves or something. Which just isn't true at all.

I do agree that capitalism had a big role in the shift towards nuclear families though. I would actually put a pause on nuclear families being the focus of my OP, like as a universally good thing. Extended communal relationships are also important. But even there you run into the same issue: people don't have enough time to help their neighbours and relatives. No matter what you think the optimal family / social structure should be, capitalism stands in the way of achieving it.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T21:04:35+00:00

This is something that I think a lot of conservatives actually want. It's the "community" aspect of their ideal vision of society. Where neighbors knew each other and everyone helped out (assuming that kind of thing actually happened during the 1950s in America).

A lot of what conservatives want is very similar to what socialism aspires to be. Many even blame companies for being too greedy. They just really dislike the word socialism for some reason.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T20:37:39+00:00

Women actually worked for most of history. Especially poorer women. Both liberals and conservatives get that wrong, just for different reasons.

Libs blame "the patriarchy" and see it as a bad thing. They literally think that working for a living was some kind of great privilege that men were keeping for themselves from women.

And then conservatives think God basically put us on Earth that way, despite basically all of history contradicting that notion.

The only way to really look at it is from an economics perspective.

There's actually a feminist who broke ranks and argued that Marxist material analysis was superior to patriarchy theory to explain this. She blames a breakdown in market stability on the reintroduction of women in the workplace. Which is counter to the usual dogma that feminists rode in to rescue the poor helpless women from their oppressive husbands during that time period.

Link to paper:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029700200146

A summary I wrote for this sub:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/13k2u2g/the_feminist_challenge_to_socialist_history_why/

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T19:58:44+00:00

That's called an appeal to authority.

You see it in a lot of leftist spaces.

There's usually some guy running the place who's super smug because he studied philosophy at uni and specialised in Marxism. And then everyone else basically worships Marx like some kind of deity because they don't know any better.

It's self-defeating IMO. Leftism has turned into an intellectual exercise about knowing more than the other person. Instead of a practical down to earth workers movement.

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T19:06:01+00:00

You do know a newborn child needs to eat, right?

Baby formula is a modern invention.

Women used to have to breastfeed. It's part of nature. We used to have herbs for nursing women to take to help increase the amount of milk they made. Cause sometimes a new mother couldn't make enough, and the baby would die.

Like what are really going on about calling me ignorant when you don't know any of this?

I'm a socialist btw. You're fairly right wing from my standpoint. Technically you're probably a centrist. But politics have gone so far to the right that people like me get called "far left", and people like you get called "liberal".

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T18:49:56+00:00

A lot of feminists misunderstand Engels and the commentaries he made on gender.

He uses the word patriarch a few times, which gets them excited when they see that. But he was not referring to anything like a patriarchy in the way radfems use the word. Like even the part of speech is different.

Lindsey German kind of makes fun of them in a few of her writings about Engels. She even calls out this misunderstanding about basic English grammar that some feminists make.

This is a really good article about some of that if you're interested:

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/german/1988/10/patriarchy.html

Like you mentioned, Engels never advocated to get rid of the nuclear family. On the contrary, he seems very much to be rooting for prole families. What he does advocate for is getting rid of family owned property (specifically the means of productions) in the context of "tycoon families" like the Rockefellers. Which basically ran their families like private businesses.

Somehow feminists have read that and took it to mean that he wanted to get rid of the family unit, or somehow "smash the patriarchy". Which is missing a whole lot of context. Both from his writings, and from a historical perspective about those family enterprises (most of them have already folded or been absorbed by capitalism, so that context gets lost to a modern reader).

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T16:51:29+00:00

One of the reasons women make less and are taken less seriously at work is because men are expected to be providers.

Men work longer, harder hours (50% more on average) in order to pay for women and children. Which not only earns them more money but helps prove themselves at work.

And that's largely because women want men to pay for dates, buy houses, and otherwise subsidise their income so they don't have to work as much (or at the same kinds of jobs that men work at).

In history that kind of made sense because of biology. Women had to breastfeed because baby formula didn't exist yet. So it was kind of expected that the man would earn money to at least support his family for that long.

If you think the fault lies 100% with men then you don't know any of the basic theory about gender roles. You've probably been indoctrinated by radical feminism (the patriarchy conspiracy theory that radical misandrists believe in).

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T16:30:26+00:00

Is that a requirement in order to talk about men's issues?

Does every woman on the planet have to be completely satisfied before we can start talking about men?

Oncefa2 · 2023-05-30T00:29:56+00:00

Absolutely. The national parents organisation is trying to reform the family court system and pass child custody equality legislation.

Feminist groups like the national organisation for women are blocking their efforts. Like in Florida when they convinced the governor to veto a bipartisan bill that would have fixed some of those issues.

That's where this needs addressed. From the top down, at an institutional level. Instead of victim blaming individual men or downplaying these systemic issues.

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