[klyrs]

Stay-at-home parenting being unpaid work is not an "attitude," it's a fact of life. The leverage that abusive wage-earners have over their "non-employed" coparent is pretty strongly tied to their respective affluence. This isn't a "left leaning" problem. It's a problem of poverty, lack of education, and a lack of society's willingness to pay parents to stay home and work there.

I'm pretty sure that infrastructure to pay parents to stay home counts as "socialism" which is vilified by the right.

[tehjoker]

Different family configurations appeared in many societies throughout history. The nuclear family is encouraged by capitalist states because one parent (the mother) staying home allows maximum flexibility for the male to be at work making money for the bosses. Importantly, the work the stay-at-home parent does is free, meaning the ruling class can pay them as little as possible. Nuclear families take up more real estate too, earning more money for banks and landlords.

The liberal feminist movement in the 1970s changed this equation somewhat. Now two parents work constantly, can barely afford their lifestyle and no one cares for the kids (or the latent gender role of the mother requires her to effectively work two jobs at full capacity)! The ruling class again wins at (again) the expense of the future as the family configuration has become biologically insufficient to reproduce. The additional workers contributed by women also makes the labor market more flexible for employers, another win.

Basically, we should ALL be doing less work and getting more services. Some poorer people are again looking at alternative family configurations because the nuclear model isn't sufficient to sustain life under these conditions.