coffee grounds

Infant thoughts

Tim Burke has a long, very interesting discussion of Home Alone America. He covers a lot of ground, but makes several important points;

• It's difficult to say that the overall welfare of society has changed, even if there have been big changes in the way things are organized.
  
• Even if you can identify big changes in particular measures -- such as the proportion of mothers working -- it doesn't automatically follow that those changes have a big effect on other aspects of our life.
  

I think that's right. On the second point, the most I would say is that the increase in married women's work is the most important change in the American labor market in the twentieth century. That I feel confident asserting. I don't feel comfortable saying that it was the biggest change for American women in the century, since to do so would be to deny the sweeping legal changes (suffrage and subsequent reforms) that occurred.

It's really quite stunning to observe that 84 years after women got the vote, only 1/7 of the House of Representatives are women. That says something about the entrenched nature of gender in some lines of work.

Posted by robe0419 at December 10, 2004 10:08 AM