Matt Yglesias

Feminism as Natalism

Michelle Goldberg wades into the debate I’ve been having with various people about the macroeconomic implications of population decline with an observation I definitely agree with:

get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there’s so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn’t, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones! Basically, the societies where birthrates have plunged to dangerous levels – Russia, Catholic countries like Poland, Spain and Italy, as well as Japan and Singapore – are all places that make it very difficult for women to combine work and family. In countries that support working mothers, like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and France, birthrates are basically fine – they’re either just at replacement, or shrinking in a very slow, totally manageable way. (The United States is the exception, for a whole host of reasons – some intuitive and some surprising – that I’ll elaborate some other time.) That’s why the Tory MP David Willetts, in a very smart 2003 report on the threat low birthrates pose to Europe’s pension systems, wrote that “feminism is the new natalism.”

I actually agree with both of the points here. It’s clear that very low birthrates imply cuts in pay-as-you-go pension systems, and I also think it’s clear that the most reasonable policy response to low birthrates is basically an agenda of family-oriented feminism. As longtime readers will know, I’m a great admirer of the social policy framework in place in your small northern European countries, hence I have a photo of a school in Finland on hand with which to illustrate the point. That said, “X makes it easier to avoid cuts to pay-as-you-go pension systems” and “X promotes higher overall levels of well-being” are not equivalent claims, and I remain fairly skeptical about the latter.

Now, the more I write about this the more I don’t really know why I’m writing about it. Not only do conservatives think low birthrates are a problem, but the smarter brand of liberals recognize that family policies that are necessary for reasons of justice and equity are probably the best solution to the problem. So everybody wins! But I’m still not sure it’s true. Indeed, Goldberg’s post seems to implicitly indicate that modestly paced population decline is perfectly fine. And I think it’s easy to see why extremely sharp demographic shifts of any kind would be problematic. So perhaps we’re not really disagreeing at all.

Jessica Valenti on Anti-Feminists and So-Called “Hook-up Culture”

This is well worth reading. I’ll quote the end:

And fact is, focusing on hyped-up problems that sell newspapers, titillate the imagination and line the pockets of conservative organizations make it that much easier to ignore actual problems young women are facing, issues that take a lot more than a moral scolding to fix. [...] If the same people who are working themselves into a panic over women’s sexuality spent half as much time advocating on behalf of issues that young women really need help with, we might actually be getting somewhere. But instead, we’re stuck talking about what a shame it is that young women are having sex, when the truth is, it isn’t a shame at all.

Read the whole thing.

Legislation Effecting Women: Now With Input From Women

Jill Filipovic offers two sharply contrasting images. One is George W. Bush signing the 2003 “partial birth” abortion ban, and one is Barack Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Similarly striking, I might add, is that even though the Lilly Ledbetter Act faced overwhelming opposition from conservatives, the ultimate Senate vote went down with a dose of bipartisanship since all the women of the Senate GOP caucus voted for it.

The Social Consequences of a Prolonged Downturn

Drake Bennett has a thought-provoking piece in the Boston Globe about what a real depression would look like in the contemporary United States. The key thing to remember, as he points out, is that even substantial shrinkage in American GDP and a prolonged period of high unemployment wouldn’t actually bring back the specific conditions that existed in the 1930s — the United States in 2007 was a much richer country than the United States in 1929, so a big fall-off still leaves in a very different situation.

One particular thing that I think is worth drilling into, though, is the potentially large social implications of a prolonged downturn. People don’t think about this much, but there was a kind of false dawn of feminist progress in the 1920s. The teens were an important time of women’s suffrage activism and the 19th amendment came into law in 1920. In the twenties you had a lot of women participating the workforce, and various shifts in sexual mores. Then came the Depression, which threw huge numbers of people out of work and led to a big drop in the divorce rate as people were too economically insecure to split up. The New Dealers had a lot of maternalist ideas, and the policies they put in place in the 1930s were specifically designed to reconstruct the economy on around an ideal of stay-at-home moms. And that’s what you saw emerge when the country emerged form the Depression during and after the war.

Flash forward to 2008 and Americans work an unusually large number of hours per day and of days per year. And part of the story here is that a lot of the American economy is dedicated to facilitating long working hours for busy people — you have various forms of child care, prepared foods, paid housework, etc. One thing you could expect to see in a downturn would be families working fewer hours and having less money and, consequently, paying for fewer of these services and doing more of it themselves. That could, however, play out in a bunch of different ways. You could imagine a world in which the disemployment spreads around at random and you have an equal number of two-earner households in which the man loses his job or is forced into part-time work as you have two-earner households in which this happens to the woman. In that case, you can expect to see further evolution of gender norms in which newly unemployed or underemployed men wind up shouldering more of the burden for cooking, cleaning, and childcare as their newly-poorer households need to cut back on expenditures. Alternatively, you could see a scenario in which the reduction in total hours worked comes disproportionately in the form of women doing less paid work. Then you’d see existing imbalances in the amount of domestic labor exacerbated and existing, but fading, gender norms further re-enforced.

Of course hopefully we’ll avoid a prolonged downturn and none of this will come up.

Feminists and Sarah Palin

Part of the idea behind picking Sarah Palin was to help broaden the GOP’s appeal to women. Instead, Palin is even less popular among women than John McCain. And if this exchange between Rick Davis and Bill Bennett is any guide, conservatives aren’t looking very seriously at addressing their problems (emphasis added):

BENNETT: I don’t know which drives them more crazy. Let me give you three things that I think drives them crazy, and you don’t have to comment. That’s she’s very attractive. That she’s very competent or that she’s very happy. You know, as a human being.

DAVIS: Yeah, all of the above.

Rachel Maddow did a segment on this last night:

That’s via Jessica Valenti. The idea that feminists, like politically conscious people of all genders and ideological inclinations, might have substantive views on the issues that contradict Palin’s doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. But in general, women are more liberal than men. And John McCain is more conservative than most politicians and Palin’s record is considerably more conservative than McCains. There’s no great mystery here. And yet Davis and Bennett can’t help but compound their problems by suggesting that women are somehow incapable of reaching conclusions about politicians for any kind of real reasons — instead feminists just hate attractive women.

The Wages of Traditionalism

Time to get more retrograde in my attitudes, I guess:

If you divide workers into four groups — men with traditional attitudes, men with egalitarian attitudes, women with traditional attitudes and women with egalitarian attitudes — men with traditional attitudes earn far more for the same work than those in any of the other groups. There are small disparities among the three disadvantaged groups, but the bulk of the income inequality is between the first group and the rest.

And, yes, the study did the basics “The comparisons were based on men and women working in the same kinds of jobs with the same levels of education and putting in the same number of hours per week.”

Sarah Palin, Feminist

All the women I know think it’s hilarious to express your political disagreements with female legislators by using the term “bitch” and mocking their physical appearance:

At least we see why McCain likes her so much.