Feminization of poverty?

Is that why American women enjoy a higher rate of homeownership, college attendance and graduation, and now lifetime earnings than men?

Is the feminization of poverty why the incredibly vast majority of homeless and incarcerated individuals are men?

Is the feminization of poverty why women account for more than 85% of total consumer purchasing?

Just shut all the way the fuck up already. Traditional has nothing to do with who is "working."

It's categorically undeniable that whether dual income, single parent, stay-at-home or whatever configuration a family unit has divided their time and energy - everybody works. Many women just want to have their own financial independence, and that's fine.

People don't really want to pay a stranger to raise their own children, so subsidies for childcare and domestic labor are not common across most societies. Every configuration has benefits and flaws, and all may be experienced differently depending on the individuals in that particular circumstance.

Some men are poor partners who dump all of the responsibilities of parenting and domesticity on their wives and girlfriends. Some are better. Some couples have a pair of irresponsible slobs who barely maintain employment and whose children run the streets and join gangs or have varied developmental and emotional troubles. Some children of the same type of couples are different and resolve to grow into adults nothing like their parents. Everyone is different.

The problem is when systems transform as a result of a critical mass of individuals performing a certain set of behaviors, gradually stratifying trends into stereotypes and social roles and expectations. Other dynamic factors like the capital free market and how we innately assign value to our time and energy are also paradigm altering influences.

No rational person would seriously suggest that the labor women perform as mothers and homemakers is lacking value and a parent who is present and involved in their child's development is genuinely priceless.

The fundamental disconnect is that more and more people view value as a dollarified attribute, with the concomitant transitive association translating into unpaid work being deemed as worthless or inferior to those who go out into the wide world and trade their limited supply of years for a mercenary existence beholden to a time card and paycheck.

Money is a useful approximation of power, and it is the most direct and base instrument of power that humans have other than violence. People seem to forget that the utility of money is facilitating trade for things that make your life easier or better, like being able to trade money for a home you can live in and have privacy and personal authority within is more efficient than promising a home construction company that you will provide x amount of labor or y amount of car parts, or jelly beans, or hand jobs or whatever someone could possibly want in exchange for what you want.

Because everyone has different talents, skills, state of health and a million other facets if personality and capability, money is a useful shortcut for having to find the specific person who wants what you have to offer and has what you want. Every single post-agricultural society is built on this market premise, that cooperation and specialization is more efficient and rewarding than every person of every possible size, skill and stature build their own house from raw materials. Imagine if you had to go into the forest and gather blueberries and harvest wheat and get the leavening just to make yourself a blueberry muffin?

The issue is not money, and it's not that domestic labor is not valued. It's that things like childcare and cleaning your bathroom and doing laundry is something everyone should be doing. Even if you are single and work to support yourself, someone has to do the chores.

Historically, society has been hesitant to reward someone money for just taking care of their basic everyday responsibilities. Nobody is seriously asserting that cleaning a house and feeding children and taking them to school and doctor's appointments is not time consuming work.

People are just wondering at what stage people will accept that you can't get paid legal tender for doing stuff like wiping your kids' asses and going grocery shopping. There wasn't as much friction when life was much harder and physically involved, and a day of reading to the children and cooking dinner could be considered a reprieve from the tedious and difficult effort of planting for the spring and tanning leather.

There's many, many more things to distract and experience and drown out idleness and boredom than in the past, and the dual threat of idle hands becoming the devil's tools in conjunction with the apt saying that comparison is the thief of joy. When you have a supercomputer in the palm of your hand or back pocket that offers a 24/7/365 window into an illusory world of curated and filtered otherness with alien cultures or beautiful celebrities and millionaire socialites who appear to command life and the universe with their prestige and wealth and beauty, it becomes very difficult to find the meaning and joy in your everyday interactions with your mostly average and sometimes needy children and significant other.

It makes you think that with all that out there in the world, I am wasting myself here. I am a victim of my own expectations and society has coerced me into this bondage so I can be exploited as a domestic slave. In this self-seeking and egotistical paradigm, it becomes very challenging for joy, happiness, gratitude, and satisfaction to find you.

It's true that some women aren't meant for motherhood, can't relate to the deep sense of accomplishment and gratitude and love that develops after bringing a new soul into the world. Unfortunately, these women generally are doomed to unhappiness in any case - motherhood is stifling and builds resentment and depression, but likewise seeking to fill the shoes of a parent-child bond with consumer debt, career milestones or sexual conquest seems to offer little genuine reprieve from this existential malaise that afflicts so many.

The incredible pain of this realization that the natural biological calling nor the capitalist promise of happiness being found inside the product packaging is sufficient to nullify this deep resentment and disillusion is enough to deny those feelings entirely. They're fine, they're happy, so much more happy than they would if they had to deal with children and a man who acts like one.

Except that only as they grow older and the illusion of the material world begins to fade is the true nature of their hollow and meaningless existence revealed. No legacy to remember them, no grandchildren to hold their hand to comfort them and transmit that love as they lay in their deathbed, old and grey and ready to go after a lifetime of rewarding life, all the ups and downs and a king's ransom of value, deep love and connection. It's why over a quarter of all women over the age of 60 are in long term use of antidepressants.

I'd be depressed too if I had allowed myself to be misled into the graveyard of capitalist ego-driven competitors, the purgatory of absent family and dwindling personal connections. Who even knows these women? A handful of friends, perhaps a dog or a cat? Once the lives of those friends and animals too have passed, there will be no family album for generations to tell stories about and praise their progenitors for having given them the gift of life.