Do you want to trade the troubles of your own era for the ills of earlier times?
Demographic and economic change has had a profound effect on women’s roles. When death rates fall, as they do with modernization, women, no longer have to have five or seven or nine children to make sure that two or three will survive to adulthood. Women today are living longer and having fewer children. After having children, the average woman can look forward to three or four decades without maternal responsibilities.
Since traditional assumptions about women are based on the notion that women are constantly involved with pregnancy, child rearing, and related domestic concerns, the current ferment about women’s roles may be seen as a way of bringing cultural attitudes in line with existing social realities. As people live longer, they can stay married longer.
Actually, the biggest change in twentieth century marriage is not the proportion of marriages disrupted through divorce, but the potential length of marriage and the number of years spent without children in the home. Census data suggest that the statistically average couple marrying now will spend only 18 percent of their married lives raising young children, compared with 54 percent a century ago. As a result, marriage is becoming less of a union between parents raising a brood of children and more of a personal relationships between two people.
A knowledge of family history reveals that the solution to contemporary problems will not be found in some lost golden age. Families have always struggled with outside circumstances and inner conflict. Our current troubles inside and outside the family are genuine, but we should never forget that many of the most vexing issues confronting us as a men and women, parents and children, derive from the very benefits of modernization – benefits too easily taken for granted or forgotten in the lately fashionable denunciation of modern times.
There was no problem of the aged in the past, because most people never aged; they died before they got old. Nor was adolescence a difficult stage of the life cycle when children worked and education was a privilege of the rich. And when most people were hungry illiterates, only aristocrats could worry about sexual satisfaction and self-fulfillment. Modernization surely brings trouble in its wake, but how many would, on balance, really want to trade the troubles of our own era for the ills of earlier times?
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Comment by exinco — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:57:47 +0100 @ 4:57 pm