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Are you sure it's just "fearmongering about getting raped" that makes it seem like a high-risk life choice to enter lifelong, irrevocable financial dependency on a man, and commit your children to same?
In today's economy, a middle-class girl who quits college at 20 to get married and have somebody's 5 babies will find that she's made a life-ruining decision if absolutely any of the following happen:
-Husband falls out of love in a commonplace way and wants a divorce (43% of women and 46% of men are obese by their 40s and at least one poster upthread considers a fat wife strictly inferior to no wife at all; plus, skinny or fat, 100% of 50-year-old women are older than the hottest 20-something at the office).
-Husband's little vices worsen into a behavioral problem (with drugs, alcohol, gambling, porn, gaming, overspending, hoarding, whatever) that make him a misery to live with or a financial liability to the family
-Husband turns out to be physically/ sexually/ emotionally abusive
-Husband turns out to be selfish and won't spend money on the kids, so they limp along with the bare minimum
-Husband commits white-collar crime, goes to prison
-Husband has a midlife crisis and unexpectedly comes out as gay/ trans/ polyamorous/ into a distasteful fetish after a decade or two of marriage
-Husband gets sick in a permanent career-ruining fashion (depression, disability, accident).
-Husband's career unexpectedly implodes for any other reason
-Husband dies
Note that any of these would have a disastrous impact not just on the girl's life, but on the lives of her future children. And every one of those negative impacts could be substantially mitigated (although not removed) by the girl's having access to a decent middle-class job, to partly support herself and the kids in a pinch. Otherwise you live a life that's one negative event away from having to dump your kids with the dodgy babysitter while you desperately slog through night courses at the community college.
If you total up all those probabilities, can the girl really feel justly confident that she and her kids won't need that career someday?
A lot of these arent really points of conflict though. If the husband gets sick in a permanent career-ruining fashion, wouldnt he also wish they had a second income? And it would have been a problem in the old days, too.
He would, presumably. It seems like a decent reason why a pro-family middle-class woman might opt to finish college and establish first-job cred through 24-25 or so before having that first kid, rather than pumping out babies right out of high school. Mid-20s is still extremely fertile and still leaves a long childbearing window if that's what you're into. Historically there have been plenty of eras when it was the norm for both middle-class women and men to work and save up for a household through their mid-20s.
I don't know why the pro-tradwife folks aren't more interested in practical family risk-management considerations. Maybe it's just the sheer appeal of imagining a nubile 20-year-old wife who can't afford to leave even if she wanted to?
...and the women who want it are all kinksters I guess? And ~every man in the 50s though keeping her trapped was more important than financial security, no romatics who thought they didnt have to worry about that?
My point is that list entires that dont themselves have a conflict of interest dont predict a different interest from men and women. So insofar as you think those are a big part of why women dont want early marriage, you should reject this branches framing that men are there on offer and women dont want it.
Nah man, I assume that young men and young women in the 50s just fell in love and settled down to have babies early because they could afford to, the way everybody does in times of high economic opportunity for the middle classes. Women might have married at 20 in the midcentury, but men also married at a median of 23, after all.
OTOH I suspect the kinds of 2025 internet people who vocally fantasize about teen brides and argue for excluding women from the workforce, but somehow never consider what historically has happened to the kiddies if Daddy gets sick or his industry contracts, are not coming to this issue from a POV of direct practical interest in forming stable, resilient families.
The guy you replied to is talking about young husbands as well. And we know you are suspicious on priors - the point is that the non-conflicting things dont actually add to that. Its a bitch-eating-crackers argument.
I hope I'm following what you're saying. It seems like you're asking me, since we agree that both men and women should want wives to have good career options in the event that the husband dies or becomes disabled, why I'm listing "husband's unexpected death or illness" among the reasons a family-minded woman might still want to finish college and work for a couple years before marrying and having children.
Is that summary accurate? If so, what does the fact that this is a "non-conflicting" concern have to do with the debate over whether women could be justified in not marrying at 20? I don't get it.
No, the point is that you are using those concerns to support one narrow claim, but if you look a bit further they have big implications for our general picture of the situation, and consequently the role that that narrow claim should play in our discussion of it.
I'm still lost. I was responding to @hydroacetylene's point, where he argued that women avoid 20yo SAHMhood not from vanity but from anxiety about risks. He blamed media "fearmongering" about rape and abuse.
I said that while I agreed about the anxiety/risk part, it was unfairly dismissive to round it off to women gullibly believing fear porn. I listed various misfortunes that families semi-commonly encounter, where a woman could spare her eventual children a lot of hardship by having decent career options in place, including the unexpected death, disability or long-term unemployment of the husband.
I really don't see how it's relevant that in those cases the husband should also want his wife to have good career prospects? AFAICT the only way the husband's alignment would have "big implications for our general picture of the situation" is if we're arguing about 20-year-old SAHMhood as a proxy for WOMEN BAD MEN GOOD. In which case I guess, sure, gotcha, this is totally an instance where MEN GOOD, but I was never denying that! And I sure hope it's not what everybody else was arguing anyway.
Could you say more about how you think the general picture is changed by the husband and wife having common interests in the scenarios you cited?
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If they came up with such, would any significant number of people who claim to oppose early marriage as a result of such risks change their mind? My belief is no, this argument is a soldier, and its falling will make no difference.
It's not a matter of flipping people who were firmly against it, it's a matter of advising, and/or addressing the concerns of, open-minded people and/or fencesitters. For example, I have a sincere interest in the topic (fewer children than I or my husband wanted, considering how to raise and advise the offspring we do have) and from my vague memories of @Terracotta 's other comments, I suspect she does too.
I want the best for my daughter. You have an opportunity to suggest to me what is best for her.
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There is a comprehensive set of scaremongering to convince girls that a ‘traditional’ marriage is incredibly dangerous and has an extremely high risk of them getting abused and abandoned, yes. You’re engaging in it right now.
In the real world, bad marriage outcomes are not distributed equally, and many of the common ones have a substantial safety net in place. I’m not some sort of MRA- it’s good that husbands retain some responsibilities for their wives and children in the event of a divorce. But the fact remains that in the rare event of a housewife with five children being divorced(and you do know most divorces are initiated by the woman, right?) she will not be left destitute and her children will be worse off, but not in a life ruining way that wouldn’t also apply if she was some kind of epic girlboss(broken homes are bad, but mama not working doesn’t make them worse).
Some of your list is exaggerating risks so tiny it’s not even worth addressing them- what fraction of middle aged men do you think suddenly discover they’re trans? I’ll cop to these guys being bad, but there’s so few of them your argument here is the equivalent of ‘kids shouldn’t go to school because of school shootings’. Others are solvable, greatly exaggerated problems, or problems which are real, but mainly bottom quintile phenomena- and I think we can safely assume that middle class girls aren’t marrying underclass men. And we live in a society that gives women substantial safety nets if they marry the guy before taking that deal. So yes, if we total up the possibility of ‘marry the nice guy your parents approve of and be a SAHM’ ruining your life, it’s small enough for a girl to be confident in her decisions.
What exactly is the safety net, beyond the noblesse oblige of the departing spouse? Favorable terms in a divorce go to the party with a good lawyer. Unless she's been very lucky and careful about secretly diverting money, SAHM has no means of hiring a shark attorney or a PI. Post-divorce, she has no resources to battle for payment of child support and spousal support, no economic slack to position herself favorably in the housing or job market. The likeliest scenario is she needs to quickly find some other man to support her and the kids, who may or may not be a good guy (stepfathers have a broadly bad reputation).
So in the event of a divorce mommy having a middle-class career is her safeguard against having to immediately remarry and subject her kids to some jerk, just to get by. Or else try to go it alone with child support plus a low-skill/low-wage job while the kids get raised by the internet.
And that's leaving out second-order consequences! Back in the golden age of what you call the "traditional marriage" (which is actually just the Victorian middle-class town marriage, not lindy at all), the husband got custody of the kids by default and the wife got absolutely nothing. Whatever safety net we currently have was developed because of women's greater economic leverage and participation in the public square, plus the added perspective of female judges/ lawyers/ lobbyists.
OK, let's run rough numbers on the most common of these disaster scenarios.
43% of first marriages end in divorce *31% of divorces initiated by husband= 13% chance the husband just up and dumps her at some point. You'd probably say that middle-class marriages are less subject to these risks; I don't see evidence of that, but fine, let's halve that to 6.5%.
Of remaining divorces, 35% of women cite their husband's infidelity, 24% abuse, 12% addiction as the reason for leaving. Assume there's some overlap and make it a total of 50% of wife-initiated divorces having one or more of these factors. So 43%*50%= 22% chance the husband eventually philanders, abuses, gambles, drinks or tokes enough to make her wish he'd dump her. Apply the classism correction, that's 11% chance.
Odds of her husband dying early run from .23%/year when he's 30 to .98%/ year when he's 55 (still too early to have fully adequate retirement savings, even with life insurance). Presumably it's not a linear increase, so say .35%/yr*25 yrs=9% lifetime chance her spouse dies and leaves her to support herself and the youngest of the kids.
Odds of her husband becoming semi-permanently unable to support the family owing to disability or job changes: this is annoying to figure out, but I'm seeing 3% unemployment, higher underemployment, 1% SSDI for working-age men with college degrees, so let's spitball 1% odds she becomes the family breadwinner by necessity.
To me, that looks like a roughly 28% chance that a married woman will eventually encounter one of the many commonplace disasters where her independent earning capacity would be a huge benefit for her and the kids. Not sure where you get the idea that these things don't happen to nice middle-class moms of 5, but every one of these scenarios, including husband's addiction, abuse, infidelity, early death, has happened to at least 1-2 of the few large families I know. Even if you think a lifetime 28% is still too high, it's fair to ask how just how low those odds would have to be to make it a responsible decision for a young woman to forgo the insurance of a decent career and instead chase an idealized 24/7 tradwife/cupcake fantasy.
And that's leaving out the lower-key negative changes in the family dynamic itself when one spouse has absolutely all the economic power and knows it. Many husbands stay kind and generous, but if not, a SAHM ends up quietly bearing a lot more borderline treatment of her and the kids, simply because speaking up would risk the disaster of her husband's leaving them unsupported. If you cruise by conversations of angry adult children who've cut contact with their parents, a common theme is "my dad was an asshole and my mom did nothing to stop it." A SAHM can't do anything to stop it, because her husband is doing her a favor just by letting her exist on his dime.
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We could always just remove the college part, have your 20s be for marriage/children and your 30s-40s for your career, like it was in the '80s. That way, you've already bought and paid for your kids by the time your [now-younger] husband starts going all weird and moldy on you, and you're still attractive enough at 30 that if you want to try again, you can.
By pushing out adulthood by 10 years, which is what college does (and, by extension, its purpose), you attach higher liability and higher stakes to things that tend to go wrong later in life- if vices are going to take hold at 35, it's better to have the kids be nearly adults when the inevitable divorce comes than for them to be 5 (less stupidity in custody battles because at that point they're a formality). Economic conditions for adulthood at 16-18 is something Boomercons benefited from greatly, and we should try to get back to that state because adulthood at that age is Good, Actually, and important for proper human development.
We won't do that, partially because it would kill the sacred societal cows that are graduation rate and female college representation, and academia is already a welfare system for older women who suffer from what you've listed above (so destroying it would be politically unviable anyway). But speeding up reproduction cycles so that women (and the men they marry) are raising families within their 25 year warranty period (even if things go sideways they'll still have the energy to fix them; 35 year old energy levels are not 25 year old energy levels!) would, I believe, have positive consequences... because they did for the generation born when that was normal.
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