In popular films fewer than a third of the characters who speak are women, and more than three-quarters of the protagonists are men.
.. The economic marginalisation this brings erodes family life. Women who enjoy much greater economic autonomy than their grandmothers did can afford to be correspondingly pickier about spouses, and they are not thrilled by husbands who are just another mouth to feed.
.. For the working class, the economy “has become more amenable to women than to men”, argues Ms Rosin.
.. in 1960 in America 30% of brides gave birth within eight and a half months of the wedding, according to June Carbone of the University of Minnesota and Naomi Cahn of George Washington University.
.. In America pay for men with only a high school diploma fell 21% in real terms between 1979 and 2013
.. There is no sugar-coating this: many blue-collar men no longer have the sort of earnings or prospects that will make women want to marry them.
.. By 2012 there were only 91 employed men for every 100 women in this group.
.. In some American inner cities there are only 50 black men with jobs for every 100 black women, calculates William Julius Wilson of Harvard University.
.. A whopping 50% of births to American women without college degrees are non-marital, but only 6% of births to college graduates are. Similar trends can be seen in Europe.
.. Employers know that young female job applicants are likely to take a lot of time off. None would admit to discriminating, of course, but it is striking that 25% of blue-collar women are on temporary contracts and 50% work part-time—of whom nearly half say they would like to work full-time but cannot find an opening.
.. A similar pattern can be seen in other European countries: men are far more likely than women to vote for protest parties such as Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, the Netherlands’ PVV and France’s Front National.
Why Women Aren’t Having Children
In the 1970s, one in ten women reached menopause without giving birth to a child. But by 2010, it was one in five, according to data gathered by the Pew Research Center, and one in four for women with a bachelor’s degree.
.. The concept of profound maternal affection, she argues, was invented in the 19th century after both birth and child mortality rates started to decline. Before that, women couldn’t afford to get attached to infants that had a 15 to 30 percent chance of not reaching their first birthday. Ditto the concept of mother-child bonding, which coincided with the rise of industrialization, “when wage labor first became an option for women” and it became important to impress upon them the significance of staying home.
.. Has anyone in recent memory declared that they were procreating out of a selfless desire to perpetuate the human race, when the human race has never, ever, been less in need of perpetuation?
.. Not having children is a perfectly rational and reasonable response given that humans are essentially parasites on the face of a perfectly lovely and well-balanced planet ..
Births to Single Mothers Are Down, Except for Those 35 and Older
Lizzie Skurnick, 41, a publisher of young adult fiction and a writer, wanted to become a mother, but didn’t want a partner at the time. She used donor sperm to conceive her son Javier, 1, and is considering having another baby in the same way. “If I had married any of the men I had dated, and they are lovely men, I would be carrying them also, because they always made less than I did,” she said. “Honestly, that’s just an additional stress on a household.”
.. But the benefits, they said, far outweighed the challenges. They avoided spousal arguments over child rearing, which they had seen tear apart friends’ marriages. They had autonomy in making parenting decisions.
Baby Boom Among New York’s Affluent
A map of birthrates by neighborhood compiled by the Health Department reveals a telling sociology — a picture of child-rearing as an entitlement of the very affluent and a managed burden of the poor.
..What is most striking is that low birthrates are found in predominantly white and solidly middle-class parts of the city — large swaths of Staten Island and portions of eastern Queens. In 2013, Bayside, in Queens, was the community district that could claim the lowest birthrate. One reason for this could be that the heightened expectations that working- and middle-class families have for raising their children are bumping up against the difficult financial realities of meeting them.
.. The main complaints have come from well-off people themselves, as they worry about overcrowding in affluent school districts and rising numbers of children attending private school, making admission even more impossible.
.. Two years ago the city’s Human Resources Administration issued a series of subway ads meant to drive down teenage pregnancy rates in poor communities. The ads showed babies lecturing prospective mothers that, for instance, their boyfriends would eventually leave them. Liberal critics considered them shaming, but Robert Doar, the former human resources commissioner, told me that in focus groups, the teenagers at whom the ads were aimed responded positively to them.