It seemed incredibly obvious to me over the past five years that women of child-bearing age, particularly married ones, would leave the professional workforce in droves. That said, I could never somehow access the data in real time, and hardly anyone was reporting it.
I saw it happening anecdotally but never had enough aggregate evidence to write an article about it. I knew the time would come and that I would have much to say.
Think back to what happened. The schools closed. Those were effectively child care institutions for many people. They were also a substitute for youth jobs. Everything about family life turned on their functioning. That goes for having moms in the professional workforce. All family life today is a delicate balancing act, even in the best of times. Break one thing, and the entire balance would fall apart.
The school closures did that. To compensate for that—an action never justified based on real data but rather merely flowed from models on disease spread generally—the workforce was sent home too. Not the whole workforce, just the “nonessential” people. The “essentials” were divided between the working class, which had to actually do stuff, and the professional class, which could pretend to work at home.
A vast number of moms in the professional workforce were deemed essential, but they worked at home, which allowed them to also care for the kids who were not at school. It was stressful, to say the least, and cocktail hour was a relief.
Meanwhile, they discovered what their kids were studying at school. The consequence was vast outrage and a new sense among professional-class moms that they needed to be more involved in their kids’ education.
Meanwhile, child care facilities were closed, the same as so many other institutions. So working-class moms had no option but to stay home with the kids, too. There they discovered a new bonding experience and recalibrated the finances of the family, newly realizing that their jobs were not actually helping household income that much once you figure in child care.
Plus, there was a new realization that moms with young children in all classes had a job to do in raising kids. Institutions were not doing it.
Five years later, we are finally getting the data. It shows exactly what I had expected. Moms are leaving the workforce in droves. More accurately stated, they never really came back.
“The share of mothers of young children in the labor market fell almost 3 percentage points in the first half of the year. Unemployment for black women has risen disproportionately over the past two years.”
Data will continue to pour in, but you see what is happening here. The cause of driving women to professional employment versus full-time motherhood has been set back probably 40 years. For now, that is an exaggeration, but this is where we are headed.
Keep the following in mind. The first time in American history when it became more common for women with school-age kids to be in the work force was in 1985. That was not that long ago.
The “feminist” revolution began in the 1960s. It took 25 years to make it real. But it wasn’t feminism that caused it, even if this ideology celebrated it.
The cause of the switch was the three waves of inflation in the 1970s that absolutely gutted household income. No longer could one income provide for an advancing standard of living for the typical middle-class household. Women of America were not emancipated. They were pressed into remunerative service to become taxpayers to the state.
That this was sold as liberation was surely one of the great lies in the history of public culture. Any man in the workforce could have explained that to any commentator. Long hours, annoying coworkers, mean bosses, strict hours, tedious tasks, ferocious competition, and then seeing your earnings robbed by government—this is not exactly a glorious life.
Men knew this. Why didn’t they explain this to women? I don’t know.
In any case, it happened. Suddenly women were competing for male jobs in the same office, which increased sexual tension and destabilized gender roles. Fast forward several decades, and we had the #MeToo movement emerge to weaponize sexual attraction and even traditional manners, such that every glance or kind word became subject to expensive litigation. Thousands of businesses simply fired high-achieving men to avoid the costs of keeping them around.
At home, the new world of “equality” was always a careful balancing act. The kids had to be in school or in expensive day care. And then there was no one at home to do normal life-maintenance things like keep the domestic environment beautiful, buy and cook good food, pay the bills, grow and water the plants, keep the place clean and do laundry, meet the repairman, deal with extended family, and cultivate community life. All of that had to be crammed into weekends.
Of course, the overclass could afford to farm all these tasks out to the working class. But what about the middle class and the poor themselves? They were forced into a kind of salary bondage, coerced to slave away to pay the bills and pay the state, while the opinion makers assured themselves that this was emancipation.
None of this had any historical precedent. In the old days, it was very typical for women to work before marriage and kids and following education. They became secretaries, switchboard operators, teachers and nurses, and so on. They would leave the workforce for children and might enter again once the nest was entirely empty, which could be 30 years later. This system worked for everyone.
Throughout the 1990s and following, we tried a completely different system that pressed absolutely everyone older than 22 into wage and salary arrangements. We called it progress. It was always incompatible with normal family life. It was destined to fall apart with the slightest stress test.
The lockdowns were that stress test. It fell apart before our very eyes. Going back to the previous ways proved impossible once the already high costs of child care grew higher. Plus many moms chose simply to homeschool their kids. So yes—and of course—they left the workforce in droves and probably permanently. It was a blessed relief.
The real reason women are leaving the workforce is financial and familial. I hate to announce this brutal fact to the upper-class opinion setters in American life, but here is the reality: Between the two sexes (and there are only two), women (who exist as actual biological realities) have, on the margin, a greater degree of passion for child-rearing and the well-being of the people thus born.
I hope by typing those words, I have not scandalized you. But this is the reality. A perfect sexual integration of the professional workforce was always and everywhere an illusion held together with tape and glue. What we are seeing now is reality reasserting itself. Finally, it might turn out that women who are liberated (yes, I use that word) from the workforce might enjoy better lives.
