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Notes -
It's not a drive for status. It's a terror of being dependent on men. Mormons, tradCaths, Amish, etc have gotten around this by convincing their women and girls that their men will treat them well, it's the ones outside, out in the world, that you should scared of. Obviously that's harder to do on a society wide scale.
Or perhaps by convincing their men to actually treat them well?
If the rumors of (for instance) the Black community are remotely true, then, yes, it's better to be dependent on the US government, despite its flaws.
I’m not doubting that- poor treatment of women probably varies on the exact same axes as everything else, which means church attending middle class white men are fantastically unlikely to mistreat their wives and poor black men are likely enough that being dependent on one is foolhardy. And sure, Mormons and tradCaths have some social technology that makes it even less likely.
Just that this is a pitch which is hard for an entire society to make because it kind of depends on being a socially conservative minority subculture with strong endogamy norms.
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