The subtle lie: Women must be powerful but not fruitful

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Sarcelle said:
What do you think of retirement communities where you have to be above 55 in order to live there long term?

There seems to be more and more of them.
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ANOTHER BOOK RECOMMENDATION

Jonathan V Last’s “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting”

He talks in that book about how, as the responsibility for caring for the elderly shifted from offspring to the state via Medicare and Social Security, more and more elderly people ended up being sequestered away from the rest of society, whether living alone or in retirement homes.
 
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Caring for children and elderly is very time consuming. Also, modern medicine has meant we are all living a lot longer. So basically having large numbers of elders who need care is a new phenomenon in all cultures: Asia, America, Europe are all having to deal with people living for decades past retirement age. The increase in population has a lot to do with longevity. When social security was first advocated it was expected to only be needed for a few years. 70 was a very long life early in the 20th century.

It’s much easier to care for one elderly person in an extended family than 4-6. It’s very unusual historically to have more elderly than children. The workers and young adults in the middle only have so many waking hours to care for themselves AND two generations.
 
My parents lived in one briefly. The moment the Association Board pounced on my mom for growing container vegetables, they put up a for-sale sign.

There’s not much we can do if there’s a demand for these places and people choose them. The appeal makes sense. I think that many of our elderly feel isolated. If they live in suburbia, where everyone goes to work all day and neighbors don’t interact much, there’s an appeal to going where they can make friends - joining a quilting circle or card-playing club or the like.

I consider visiting the lonely elderly fulfilling one of our faiths Works of Mercy - visiting the imprisoned.

Did our age segregation spawn the isolation or vice versa? Chicken or egg?
 
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joyfulandactive said:
70 was a very long life early in the 20th century.
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The numbers can be misleading. Many children died in infancy and childhood, so that throws the average off. But those who could survive past that point could enjoy some great longevity.

But don’t believe me until I can find the link that I have in mind . . .
 
Raising children does take two parents.

The nuclear family - 2 children only family, was first coined in 1947. There was a major push in that direction leaving the wife often with less work.

I just remember the 60’s that famous speech when Gloria Steinem said that women who stayed at home should get paid because their work had monetary value but finished saying —and paid for occasional prostitution.

I still have this recorded so I don’t forget that speech.
 
I do believe you Blackforest but basic census show that people did not live as long as we are living now. It is definitely a fact of life that all modern economies are having to deal with the fact that we have large numbers of adults living into their 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond. It’s not any kind of criticism it is one of the benefits of modern medicine. But it doesn’t mean that working adults are cruel if they cannot have a full time job, raise their children AND care for 4 or even more elderly parents (or grandparents!). That’s why it’s so important to stay in good health as we age.

In China they have the problem of the one child policy meaning that a smaller generation is trying to care for the much larger elderly one.
 
joyfulandactive said:
we have large numbers of adults living into their 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond.
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That’s not really the issue. The issue is that we don’t have enough young people. People suddenly stopped having babies in developed countries and that has left our population extremely top-heavy. Hispanic immigration and first-generation reproduction (they tend to regress to the white average in America after a generation) is almost singlehandedly responsible for US’ not experiencing population decline.

You can have lots of old people as long as those old people also produced a lot of children and grandchildren. Our very simple problem right now is that they didn’t.
 
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The wonderful benefits of modern medicine have meant children surviving who would not in the past and older people living much longer. We now have two or three generations ABOVE working age who need care.

These are recent demographic phenomenon.
 
HopkinsReb smaller families happened in the USA much sooner than commonly realised. Before the Second World War family size had already shrunk in America. The Baby Boom was significantly bigger than the generation before it for that reason. After the War prosperity and peace encouraged parents to have an average of 4 children. Before WW2 two children was the average, and this had happened before the Great Depression.

The reason families had less children is the same as now; economic insecurity. This was an era before any kind of social security net. In the Victorian era there were lots of abandoned children on the streets of all the major European cities. Many of our famous Saints work from this era was involved in feeding, housing and educating them. Some immigrant men who came to America and couldn’t find work were so humiliated they would abandon their families. This was a big problem in the Irish working class areas of New York and Boston as I studied it at college but I’m sure they weren’t the only group - this was just the historical group I was studying at that time. You still see this today, economic stress is a big factor in family breakdown.

Actually my husband researched his family tree and found that a male relative abandoned his family on the East coast, came out West and married bigamously, having another family.

This was never the majority but it happened enough that Catholic orders were helping abandoned wives and children.
 
MikeInVA said:
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YourNameHere:
Having children is not a profession.
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Having children is a biological process. Raising children is absolutely a profession.
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No it’s not. Not according to the dictionary. Click on the links below.

www.merriam-webster.com

Definition of PROFESSION

the act of taking the vows of a religious community; an act of openly declaring or publicly claiming a belief, faith, or opinion : protestation; an avowed religious faith… See the full definition
www.merriam-webster.com www.merriam-webster.com

dictionary.cambridge.org

profession

1. any type of work that needs special training or a particular skill, often…
dictionary.cambridge.org dictionary.cambridge.org

A profession is

any type of work, esp. one that needs a high level of education or a particular skill:

You don’t need specialized type of training to be a good parent. Being a parent is hard work of course, but one doesn’t need to be specially qualified.
 
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joyfulandactive said:
HopkinsReb smaller families happened in the USA much sooner than commonly realised. Before the Second World War family size had already shrunk in America. The Baby Boom was significantly bigger than the generation before it for that reason. After the War prosperity and peace encouraged parents to have an average of 4 children. Before WW2 two children was the average, and this had happened before the Great Depression.
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I realize this. But it’s just now getting to a crisis point, as the baby boom and the economic growth born of rebuilding Europe bailed the US out in the mid-20th century. And it can no longer be blamed on economic insecurity, as the richer the country, the lower the fertility rate.

Blame the culture, blame the pill, blame public policy, blame whatever. It’s probably a bunch factors. But it’s no longer economics. It’s posing a severe demographic crisis in Japan, where the fertility rate is now 1.44 children per woman (replacement level is about 2.1, if I remember correctly), and Singapore.

China also is facing a severe problem thanks to the One Child Policy, but they might avoid it by just sending their old people off to die in the desert or harvest their organs. The Communist Party doesn’t care all that much about its people, especially once they’re no longer productive.

Germany has a fertility rate of 1.5 children per woman, and Germany is one of the world’s strongest economies. UK and UK are both 1.8. There’s a severe crisis here, and its fix is not primarily economic.
 
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Who are you to say being a mother is enough for THAT particular woman? St. Elizabeth of Hungary had 4 children, left royalty for poverty and decided to be a nun after giving to the poor and venerating Mary.
So if women are called to do other things as well, it’s not a bad thing. Catholics need to be aware of that, that there are talents women have that God uses as well!
 
AlruwhAlquds said:
Who are you to say being a mother is enough for THAT particular woman?
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I just want to understand why raising a family is not considered enough?
Sarcelle said:
You don’t need specialized type of training to be a good parent. Being a parent is hard work of course, but one doesn’t need to be specially qualified.
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So anybody can do it? No big deal? That is so sad. I think being a mother and raising a family is the most rewarding thing a woman can do, I never said that it is the only thing a woman can do.
 
I look at it like this. Just because men and women do different things doesn’t make them unequal. Its like a soccer team. You have a goalie who guard the goal. And you have a striker who tries to score goals. They’re doing different things. But they’re not unequal. The team needs both equally to succeed. In fact, if one day the goalie said “I don’t feel equal to the striker - I’m going to be a striker too!” Well now you have two strikers but an empty goal nobody is guarding so your team won’t do too well. In same way we have many families today with 2 parents working and no parent fulfilling the role of raising the kids. Different does not mean unequal.
 
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