This is a touchy topic; we've had several threads in the past on related topics, all of them started by Bodhisattva and titled "Why Does Society Hate Families" (parts 1, 2, and 3 respectively, as each thread was eventually locked down because of the contention that ensued), in which he bemoans the waning popularity of the "Traditional Family", as more women abandon traditional female roles either by choice or by necessity.
I have long asserted that while sex is a biological imperative, gender is a social construct, and that people of both sexes should feel free to disregard gender roles if they do not find them useful.
Here's my position: I feel that the main point of traditional female gender roles was to keep women isolated in their homes and occupied with minutia and drudge work, so that they would not compete with men educationally or in the workforce.
Women are individuals and have varying aptitudes and levels of competency and capacities for learning, just as men do.
Men have suspected if not acknowledged this for centuries, and understood that if permitted to, many women would be capable of competing with them if not outdoing them in many different previously male-dominated fields: business and industry, politics, medicine and science, the arts, you name it.
Their answer to protecting the power structure was to define women's role as to stay at home, keep house, raise children, and be a supportive player in their husbands' success in the larger world.
As time went on and women began to openly question this- starting in the late 1800s, probably- those with an interest in maintaining the status quo had to work harder to silence and discredit these dissidents, and to glamorize the traditional female role so that the majority of women would remain complicit in it.
This phenomenon peaked in the post WWII era- the 1940s and 50s.
During the war, unprecedented numbers of women had left their homes to work in factories, in offices, in hospitals, and in government-related work. The power structure had at that time actually encouraged them to abandon their "sacred, god-given roles" as wives and mothers, and go to work to help their men on the front lines, to help America win the war.
Women did that, and found they liked it. Many young women also went to college during this time, since enrollment at colleges and universities was low with so many young men gone to Europe and to the South Pacific.
Then we won the war, and the men came home. They had suffered years of unspeakable trauma and misery overseas, and they wanted comforting, "traditional" women like their mothers waiting to welcome them home.
Instead they found that their young wives had become independent and assertive in their absence- self reliant working women accustomed to raising their children alone and running their homes the way they wanted to, not used to explaining their decisions, being argued with, or even having any input from any one else on the issue.
The men wanted their jobs back. After all, they had been on the front lines. They had won the war. They were the heroes.
Women were forced en masse to leave the workplace, give up their independence and return the home.
Men wanted to attend college on the new GI Bill. Women were forced to abandon their studies to make room for them.
Anything else would've been unpatriotic, anti-American, subversive, practically treasonous. These were war heroes.
So, in the late 40s, American women reluctantly left the larger world and returned to the home, and closed the doors behind them. There they remained through the next two decades, until the civil rights and women's liberation movements finally broke them free of their exile for good.
But during the 1950s, things got very bad indeed. Women were not happy at home. There was nothing to do there. The economy was booming; new young families could afford to leave cities and move to the newly-developed suburbs, and millions did. This ultimately only increased women's isolation, however, removing them even further from anything that actually mattered to the world at large. In confusion, young families began spending thousands on new home furnishings and appliances, hoping that by making mom's prison more comfortable, she would become happier in it.
This only made things worse; with the kids in a suburban school all day and mom stranded alone in a ranch house full of washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, etc, she no longer had any role at all.
"Keeping house" only took fifteen minutes a day and involved nothing more strenuous that pushing a few buttons and flipping a switch.
Many women of this period became neurotic, depressed, alcoholic, even suicidal in their loneliness. They had random affairs with delivery men, got hooked on amphetamines which doctors prescribed like candy for weight loss and for the "chronic fatigue" which suddenly seemed to afflict every woman in the country, became "serial breeders" and had eight, ten, or twelve children to try to lend meaning to their pointless lives. They became neurotically controlling meddlers in their children's affairs as they attempted to live their lives through their children, and as a result raised an entire generation of universally unhappy and unstable people who have had difficulty assuming adulthood or maintaining relationships (the Baby Boomer generation). Some became irrational hypochondriacs. Some overate chronically. Some couldn't stop crying, and had to be hospitalized. Some killed themselves. A few abandoned their husbands and children and ran away.
Just as the "Rosie the Riveter" propaganda campaign had lured women en masse into the work force at the start of WWII, now the power structure, in conjunction with advertisers, the entertainment industry, and the media, aimed a new propaganda campaign at women- one whose goal was to convince them to stay home.
It was in everybody's best interest that they stay home and not participate in the larger world- everybody, that is, except the women themselves, and probably their children.
It was a two-pronged campaign: first, the "traditional women's role", the role of housewife, was ludicrously glamorized; second, women with other ambitions who diverged from this role were viciously maligned as "unnatural", "unfeminine", "unattractive", homosexual, anti-American (which was no joke during the McCarthy era; people were being fired, blacklisted, and even arrested on similar charges), un-Godly, anti-family, etc.
Our society made having ambitions beyond washing dishes and changing diapers seem so fundamentally unsafe and undesirable and terrifying for women, that most women meekly complied by subjugating their humanity, their dreams of being more than a housewife and mother- of participating in a meaningful way the world outside their ranch homes- and they remained prisoners of the "traditional female role" for twenty years.
In the late 60s, they broke free, and they did this so powerfully and definitively that they shattered- forever, I think- the illusions and myths and outright lies that allowed them to be imprisoned in the first place. Never again will society be able to credibly insist that all women are "best suited" for housework and isolation. Women have proven definitively that they are well-suited for participation in the larger world, as suited for it as men are.
What is not widely acknowledged, however, is why it happened, nor what the motives for it were, nor the fact that it was systematic and deliberate. It was not just some mindless social phenomenon that picked up momentum on its own. It was planned by men in board rooms.
Yet, there will no reparations for women of my grandmother's generation, whose lives and health and educations and dreams and human potential were stolen from them.
Today, the law has made things ostensibly "equal"; gender discrimination is against the law, along with racial discrimination and a number of other evil things. It still happens, of course, but now victims have recourse when it does.
Where was I going with all this?
Oh. The "Pro-Family" movement. The new one, the pro-christian, anti-contraception one.
All I can say is, they're trying to thrust women back into their prison. They're trying to strong-arm them out of their rightful, hard-earned place in society and chain them once again to the kitchen sink. One of the most effective ways to do this is to subvert them from the inside out: to remove their ability to control their own bodies, their own fertility. A women with ten children has little strength or energy, few resources to fight back.
They are using many of the same glamorizing "catch phrases" that were used during the 1950s: praising housewifery and motherhood as "the single most important job" anyone could have (overlooking the fact that most women today manage it nicely while still holding down full-time jobs outside the home at the same time), talking about women's "natural, god-given" role, as if there's only one, and women are more or less interchangeable. The villainization of strong, independent women. It's all old, tired news.
Anyway, these are my thoughts.
If they manage to widely ban contraception and abortion, I'd recommend that all the women in this country go on strike from sex or become lesbians.
It would only take a year or two for the birth rate to plummet to levels that would panic them, and make them give us whatever we ask for.
But, yes, as per the OP, certainly the poor and uneducated are the most susceptible to propaganda campaigns.
Women who truly are suited to little else but performing drudge work and basic biological functions (eating, crapping, sleeping, reproducing... and there are a few, just as there are a few men like this. Collectively, they are the lowest common denominator of any society) are obviously going to be proud and happy to suddenly be elevated as an example for all other- and previously, more competent and successful- women to follow.
It's not their fault, they can't help it.
I'm sure it's very validating to them to suddenly be told that their way is the only truly "correct" way, that their "job" (of lying on the sofa all day watching soap operas) is somehow "more important" than everybody else's, they are fulfilling their natural feminine roles, while more accomplished and independent women are ungodly, unwholesome, unattractive, unwomanly, and unnatural.
I doubt many people are going to fall for it this time around, though.
As of yet, this movement's pretty much been restricted to fringe-element conservative christian factions, while being rejected and laughed at by the mainstream public.
