[ChiperSoft]

The problem was that which of those two roles you played was assigned at birth, and if you didn’t want the homemaker role, well too bad, you can’t have a bank account and most employers won’t hire you. That didn’t change in the US until the 1960s.

If you were a gay woman, you were forced to be a homemaker for a man you didn’t love because it was the only way to even access an income.

Black women could get jobs… as homemakers for rich white families where the wife either didn’t want to do the work or couldn’t keep up with the mountain of labor dumped on her. But they were paid a fraction what a white man could earn.

If you were a man who wanted to be a homemaker, literally everyone looked down on you and many institutions considered you a drain on society. This attitude still persists to this day.

But sure, corporations are why women now exist in the workforce.

[TeMPOraL]

> The problem was that which of those two roles you played was assigned at birth, and if you didn’t want the homemaker role, well too bad, you can’t have a bank account and most employers won’t hire you. That didn’t change in the US until the 1960s.

The point is that this didn't change into a choice. It changed into everyone being assigned the role of a laborer at birth - instead of reality where anyone can get a job, we have a reality where everyone has to get a job.

Want to be a homemaker? Well, too bad, that's generally not an available role anymore - unless you find someone with above-average income (or accumulated wealth) to fund your stay-at-home work. Man or woman, gay or straight, your only role is now to make money on the market. All the usual homemaker responsibilities? Why, those are all services now, which you can pay for out of your salary.

[fragmede]

House husband households, where the man is the homemaker, and the woman (in the case of a heterosexual relationship) is the high powered lawyer/c-suite exec/other highly paid professional are on the rise. Attitudes that the man in this case is a "drain on society" are slowly changing.

[ghaff]

Funny how that works.

I've known a few couples where that was the case. They had maybe a couple young kids and the wife made very big bucks. You could hire a nanny but, if the husband wasn't especially passionate about his work and was happy to stay home, it's not the worst system one could imagine.