Are working women the source of all of our problems?

First -ladies, please don't stab me! I once made a joke about how women should be baking me pie that did not go over very well...

I know that we all spend time considering the evolution of our society trying to understand the consequences of history, natch. One meme that keeps popping up for me is related to the importance that traditional gender roles played in maintaining a sense of community, and the failure (or deliberate structuring) of our current society to fill the niche left vacant after women entered the workforce in a big way, and the reasons for and positive and negative consequences of that evolution.

Consider:

"Astyk makes the excellent point regarding the destruction of community through overwork and the herding of women out of the home and into the workplace. Women can't just be (unless they are rich) — they have to have an occupation, and the default occupation — "homemaker" — carries a bit of a stigma. Women have always been the backbone of any community, and the regimentation of women's lives was a brilliant move in the direction of totalitarian consumerism, because it allowed relationships even within the family, such as child-rearing, to be commercialized. Once all social interaction is centered around consumption patterns, community as a notion becomes little more than an advertising gimmick, and self-organizing properties of society become restricted to pursuing the latest commercial fashion."

Referring in part to an article here:

"As I have said over and over again, the version of the women's movement that succeeded in the US and around the world couldn't have been more useful for neo-liberal growth capitalism if someone had commissioned a study. There were and are versions of feminism that critiqued this model, and they were largely shunted aside in favor of a world where everyone's work is co-opted into the growth economy. This is not the fault of feminism, who rightly felt that who got to go out and be educated and professional should not be decided on the basis of gender. But until someone goes home again, and starts taking up the low impact domestic work, and making time for daily communal and political life, the hopes of our imagined communities are fairly faint. This may be the single hardest nut to crack for most of us - because we really do need the money, and indeed, have become dependent on what hurts us the most."


I have to admit that I've never spent a lot of time thinking about feminism. It seems like there might be a lot to be gained from new (or old but neglected) ideas about this though. I guess there is a lot to be gained from different ideas about a lot of things though....