The feminist revolution, as it relates to women, has roots at least in the 19th century, but gathered noticeable momentum in developed countries with the civil rights movement of the 1960s near the beginning of the information age, leveling the differences between men and women, transforming the basis of their relationships from hierarchy and power to equality and mutual self-serving cooperation. This leveling of hierarchy and decentralization of authority is a corollary characteristic of the diametric reorientation in society’s adolescent restructuring, we will find. Household appliances liberated women from housework, while education and career opportunities opened the outside world to them. Garry Becker[1] observed that before the feminist revolution, men and women were locked into their respective traditional roles by economic necessity. Women needed men to bring in an income and men needed women in order to maintain the home. But now both men and women earn incomes and take care of the home and the leveling of economic differences has undermined stereotypical gender roles, with the result that domestic relationships are chosen more freely and single parents families, sequential marriages, and shared family units have become more the rule than the exception. The equalizing of men and women with respect to money, knowledge, power and responsibility diametrically reorients gender roles, and all at once restructures a sizeable portion of human relationships. The equalization is far from complete, but the direction and irreversibility of the trend are apparent. Hanna Rosin, in “the end of Men and the Rise of Woiman”, 2012, argues that women are already ahead, not only educationally but increasingly professionally and socially, at least in America, where societal evolution’s leading edge can be placed.
Gary Becker, in “A Theory of Marriage” (1973), argued that up until around the 1950s economic necessity dictated that in typical domestic partnerships the woman ran the home and the man brought in the money, but that this necessity then began to fade away. Gender relationships began to shift away from a hierarchical patriarchy in the direction of parity.
[1] Becker, Garry, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)’
Masculine qualities: stoicism, competitiveness, aggression, vs feminine qualities: intuitive, creative, compassionate, nurturing, cooperative, communicative, sensitive, caring.
Is there a crisis of masculinity? Do worries over masculinity obscure real problems for men? Economist, 051223 https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/10/excerpt-from-career-and-family-by-claudia-goldin/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Gazette%2020231018%20(1)
“It is open to men to debate whether economic progress is good for men or not, but for women to debate the desirability of economic growth is to debate whether women should have the chance to cease to be beasts of burden, and to join the human race.” W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (1955)
“Gender equality and economic development share a synchronous existence. Gender equality is a spur to economic development, particularly where the well-being of children is concerned, and economic development, as the head-note graphically suggests, fosters gender equality.” Claudia Golden, “The U-Shaped Female Labor Force Function in Economic Development and Economic History”, xxxx