How come in societies in the past you could work your 20 hours a week of hunting or gathering, a woman could have a child, and everyone could be provided for, and no one today considers them all lazy, reprobate, or overly demanding? And yet, today, we have people who could work 80 hours a week and still barely get by and women who want to be a part of the labor force but also want to still provide us with our future generations, and half of us complain about what a bunch of lazy, stupid, and demanding people they are.
I don't want to go back to the past, but if you don't think this gap between the two in terms of perspective sucks, then, man, that sucks. In some ways, while we've largely improved our quality of life, we've just made things more difficult on ourselves and have isolated ourselves from a sense of what is required of us to function appropriately as a well-adjusted society.
We can't have our cake and eat it at the same time. We're going to have to decide what is more important to us: providing women with a means to work, have children, and still contribute another income to a family that now requires at least two incomes, or returning to gendered economic models before post-Industrial society. Our problem at the moment is that we're attempting to do both at the same time. This won't work forever.
