- Has women working fulltime outside the home been a good or bad development for the American family?
It has been a bad development. Of course, the fact that men work fulltime outside their homes has also been a bad development.
Has our culture improved since women entered the workforce in massive numbers
Our culture has practically disappeared. The question is analogous to “did the development of the shotgun improve the condition of passenger pigeons?”
Are our children better or worse off?
Worse. Unless, of course, one believes that children prefer being raised by strangers.
Has women working fulltime made this nation stronger, weaker, or no impact?
We get into some deeper waters, here. Who, or what, is the “nation”? If we mean the interests that own it and direct it, then it has gotten stronger. They have twice the number of workers, and in the absence of twice the amount of work to do, they have reaped the benefit of the depressing tendency that has on wages. With twice as many people making capital investments in a career, they have reaped the benefit on the interest charged for the investments.
However, if one defines the nation differently, for instance, as the government, then manifestly it is getting weaker. Ten years to not win a war in Afghanistan? Weak.
If the people are deemed to be the nation, then again, they are becoming weaker. As the mortgage crisis illustrates, they are being dispossessed. The number of people with a meaningful amount of land is less than ten percent, and declining. Whether this is attributable to women in the workforce is hard to say, but that the two things coincide is undeniable. Women may be working, but they are not owning in like percentages. If they are owning, they are not having much of a positive impact, therefore are indistinguishable from the owners who were not women.
We may have women senators, but the country is still broke.
Have our children become stronger or weaker in the faith?
It would be difficult to argue they have become stronger, because many now have no one to teach them.
Has entering careers and fulltime work been good or bad for women (and women who are moms)?
Good, in that women who have no husbands, or whose husbands have left have some means to support themselves. However, this has been overrated. Most of the women who lack husbands and have children are poor.
In general, however, women in the paid workforce is bad for them. It has put them in the same position as men in the paid workforce, which is generally a position of subservience. It teaches them, as it teaches men, to look to the master for support, to owe to the master the loyalty that belongs to Christ, and should be expressed through family devotion.
It makes them slaves.
Would women prefer to work and let their husbands stay at home and care for their children? Or, would women rather both spouses work?
One presumes that like men, women want a convergence of all good things! The problem is that it is the false promise of being able to acheive a utopia has induced women into giving up what they had, as it did men. That is the essence of sales: you persuade someone with something of value to part with it for something of lesser value.
Humanity has trod this path already, and the future of women will be no different than the past of men.
In the beginning, man and woman loved each other because they saw God intended them to do so. They lost this knowledge, and loved each other for their strength. When men first began to get weak, women loved them for their money. Without the money, women ceased to love them at all.
A woman can be loved for her beauty, or her loyalty, or her wealth. The problem with love, though, is its exclusivity. If the wealth is not exclusive, or if it is not constant, then…
People may want many things. But they won’t get them.
Would it better to have men stay at home with the kids, rather then neither parent staying home
A third of a loaf is still better than no loaf.
I say a third, because when men went out to work and women stayed home, humanity was still half right: the female half was still doing what it was supposed to do, although under the difficult condition of having to do it when the male half was effectively insane.
If we just switch positions, no body will be doing what they are meant to do, except at least the children will not be brought up by total strangers.
ALL of it. Nothing was left to a nanny, nothing happened at day care. In fact I mourned when they started going to preschool a couple of days a week. I think one parent should have those experiences, and I do believe that mothers need to be that parent when the kids are small. The nurturing is ours in the early years. The father can provide a different kind of parenting a little later on. God made women and men different and there is a purpose to the differences, so that we each have our proclivities and they belong in different spheres.
