The paradox of choosing patriarchy in a liberal society

On women's labor, freedom and gender egalitarianism

Working women and the waning of patriarchy

Should gender roles from the time of legal patriarchy be a choice for women in a liberated society? On the one hand, if feminism is about choice, then the choice should be a legitimate one. Indeed, feminism seems mostly about choice from my experience, and you’re not allowed to assign value to the choices lest you be ‘judgmental’ of your fellow woman. The zeitgeist tells me I should be free to do whatever I want, regardless of the consequences to myself and others.¹

On the other side of the question of ‘traditional’ roles lies a discomfort with the women who would want to choose dependence on a man because feminism also valorizes work as the source of female independence. And there is a truth in it because, in patrilocal societies like India, women are controlled through the prohibition of their working outside the home. Punishments for working women are exacted domestically by husbands and in-laws as abuse and externally by the constant threat of being raped by men who undress you with their eyes on the street. A doctor was recently brutally raped and murdered, illustrating the dangers facing working women who dare to seize their independence. So, the stricture on working reinforces the normative male violence toward women, which prevents a critical mass from working outside the home.² And unless the majority of women participate in the labor force, the threat of sexual violence will continue to loom large—a problem of collective action.

Sexual violence had to be dealt with in Western societies to allow women to enter the workforce en masse. Women had to do so because the neoliberal economic consensus made it untenable for only men to work. A man could no longer earn enough alone to support a family, so feminism was almost beside the point; women had to work, and feminism provided a post hoc ideological justification that led women to see it as freedom. The second feminist wave coincided with women entering the workforce in droves in the U.S., but I don’t think feminism was the causal mechanism. It wasn’t popular enough among women writ large to be causal. And back then, working was the vehicle for women’s freedom from patriarchy regardless of how feminist they felt.

The only way to defeat patriarchy was to earn your own money and not have to marry. Working opened the door to the choice of spouse as normative, which further caused patriarchy to recede. Women had to be able to inherit and own property as a result of these changes. The end of patriarchy as an organizing system was made inevitable, ironically, by an economic regime that was contemptuous of the working class, which both Democrats and Republicans eagerly embraced, starting with Nixon. It could not hold in a new world where the top 10% began pulling away from the rest.

Choosing to stay at home and hypergamy

A former friend who became a Trump supporter once said to me that women engage in hypergamy, and I found it to be a problematic statement at the time. Unfortunately, time and experience have proven it true. I don’t assign a moral weight to the tendency. It’s deeply rooted in how our psyches evolved in the context of male domination of wealth and resources.

Men have fallen behind women in educational attainment and status. We now have a problem with the supply not meeting demand. There are too many educated and affluent women for every man, and it’s not a tiny reason for many of my friends, who are otherwise desirable and mature, being single.

If a woman normatively wants a man who makes as much or more, I’m not judging her for it. I married someone who technically made the same amount but had far less ambition. I didn’t leave him for that reason. Still, once my salary jumped above his, I finally asked myself if the relationship was worth putting up with his lack of ambition and generally lazy, complacent approach to life. When the woman makes significantly more than the man, the chances of divorce increase. We can’t erase tendencies from millennia of evolution in a few decades, and it’s barely been fifty years since women started entering the workforce en masse. Ambition, a stereotypically male trait, is essential to many women, and rightly so. Similarly, if you expect your partner to be ambitious, you should also be yourself. My psychologist told me not to “should”; sorry.

Women should not be blamed for considering status when seeking a mate. Many men dismissively discuss hypergamy as a tendency inculcated by modernity, but it’s as old as human history and should not be considered gold digging on its own. Yes, some women prioritize men who can give them lots of money to live a consumerist lifestyle, which I would consider gold-digging. But wanting to find someone making as much or more than them doesn’t qualify.

The unfortunate pragmatism of women’s full-time child-rearing

The lack of men with high salaries and status inevitably means a continued drop in the birth rate and a preponderance of highly educated single women. The effects of the gender gap in educational and wealth attainment are already felt in electoral politics with the alignment of women with liberalism. At the same time, men resist such drifts or move rightward. The backlash against feminism can be explained partially in terms of the gender gap in income that results in fewer paired men. And we already know of the adverse effects on children who are raised in single-parent households, most likely to be headed by the mother. They have worse outcomes than children raised by two parents.³ Women head most single-parent households without degrees and work for hourly wages.

Two-parent households are no longer the norm among the non-degreed classes, causing a further wealth gap between educated and non-degreed women separately from the chasm between educated women and non-degreed men⁴. The gender gap in income and wealth is a class gap that causes gender-based disparities; it’s not caused by gender alone but also by diverging social mores based on educational attainment. And it doesn’t help that the structure of schooling is biased against boys due to their being developmentally behind girls and having worse executive functioning.

The realities of raising a child mean that either one parent has to stay at home or you have to pay the equivalent of college tuition for childcare, often making a woman’s career less economically impactful to the family than her staying at home. The impact on the woman as an individual will be negative if she wants to work. It makes less sense from a biological perspective for the woman with young children to work while the father does all the childcare because a child’s bond early in life is more profound with the mother as she, you know, feeds him or her from her body. Not to mention that women with young children are understandably exhausted, making their time at work extra draining.

I’m not convinced that the motherhood penalty is only arbitrary discrimination. That narrative doesn’t account for the increase mentioned above in exhaustion for new mothers, which would undoubtedly lead to a temporary drop in productivity. When I was depressed and exhausted all the time, I was undoubtedly less effective at work than today. I don’t buy that women are facing an economic penalty for simply having children. Many will need to cut back because of the toll on the body. If I had a kid, I would want to stay at home for the first few years and not subject myself to the exhaustion of capitalist exploitation and having to feed a human from my breast constantly while making sure it doesn’t kill itself. Finally, it should be noted that HR departments are primarily women, and we are coming to dominate white-collar America because of our high degrees of educational attainment. The most flagrant discrimination I’ve seen against new mothers has come from women. That’s not to say men don’t do it, but women are undoubtedly complicit, as they say.

The tension between conservative cultures and feminist liberation

My partner and I watch various reality shows about dating and marriage because we deeply enjoy psychoanalyzing the contestants. These shows also often reveal more significant contentious issues of gender and class that naturally arise in intimate relationships. We just finished Love Is Blind UK, and I want to use one couple as a case study of the tension around choice, money, and feminism in the West.

The woman in the couple, Maria, was raised in the UK in a family originally from Morocco. She says she’s from a conservative Muslim family composed of strong women, and she is a makeup artist. Her fiancé Tom is a white man raised by a single mother and is a PR executive. As you can probably tell, there are so many juicy issues from this couple—class, culture, gender roles, feminism, and choice.

There are women from traditionalist, patriarchal cultures in Western societies who think they should have the choice of raising their children at home without working because they rightly recognize that it might be best for the children to have a full-time parent. Choosing to stay home may also be partially influenced by the assumption that women shouldn’t have to work and a man should be able to fulfill the normatively male provider role. The choice may also factor expecting a man to support them and wanting to be free to live a life of consumption without laboring outside the home. It could be one or multiple of these motivations.

I don’t know what motivated Maria, but she told Tom at the outset that she wanted to be a “traditional stay-at-home wife” and then revised it to be while the children were young. It seems like a reasonable desire because work doesn’t necessarily mean liberation, even for women raised in the West. I find work to be an oppression of sorts that’s different from the discomfort of being dependent on a man.

Tom, being raised by a single mother, experienced the results of being deprived of the resources and attention of a second parent. He could have ended up favoring a stay-at-home wife who could raise his kids or preferring his spouse to have a career because his mother kept the household afloat alone. Because my mother was the breadwinner, I never wanted to depend on a man. I had seen my father fail to provide like all my classmates’ fathers clearly could, and it affected me negatively because our lack of money meant I would never have real friends among the wealthy children I went to school with. But, if my partner made enough and were okay with taking responsibility for earning, I would gladly stay at home. The trade-off would be that I’d likely have trouble finding work after being out of the workforce.

The question of ‘unpaid labor’

Another point of contention in the conception of gender roles by choice is the question of ‘unpaid labor.’ I take issue with characterizing childcare and domestic management as ‘unpaid labor’ because it cheapens something valuable. It's not something I have to do because I’m oppressed but because I want my domicile to be inviting and calming. If you and your spouse both work, it’s reasonable to expect an equal division of childcare and domestic duties. But, I have friends who found they’re much happier after they stopped trying to force the division and accepted that they want to do most of the childcare and are better suited to it. Again, because of biological realities, I’m not sure that is as unjust as it’s painted to be.

Because domestic labor is denigrated as lesser than labor outside the home, I’ve met women who don’t work outside but still expect their spouses with full-time jobs to split the labor and childcare. I value gender egalitarianism, so my sense of fairness leads me to conclude that if I’m not going to contribute income and my spouse is expected to work, most domestic labor and childcare should be my responsibility. But in the name of feminist-branded egalitarianism, the division is considered unfair. We should also stop calling domestic work ‘unpaid labor.’ It strikes as a rather capitalist way of looking at the domestic sphere, which feminism should resist, in theory, if it is egalitarian. But I think feminism is more about having your cake and eating it than egalitarianism.

Going back to the LIB couple, they mutually decided not to marry because Maria wanted to stay home, and Tom saw that as dependency and antithetical to raising empowered daughters. In Tom’s defense, she tested him by seeing if he’d pay for ice cream on a date, and when he didn’t, she scolded him for being insufficiently respectful. After the wedding didn’t happen, he said that he didn’t want to teach his daughters that the man should pay for everything and teach his sons that the man is required to do so. It’s a reasonable perspective because if a child’s mother stays home, they are possibly either going to see patriarchal gender roles to be normative or will come to resent their mother for embodying roles that the wider society has rejected. My ex-spouse looked for a woman opposite of his mother, who stayed home, married a higher-status man than her family of origin, and valued a materialistic lifestyle, likely reinforced by her not having grown up in a wealthy family.

Finally, at the reunion, Maria said that Tom had insulted her family of “strong women” in his comments after saying no, which is unreasonable because his preference for a working spouse is valid, given his upbringing. Men are allowed to have preferences on this question. For him, his experience of class certainly affected his view of egalitarianism between the sexes. This is an example of feminism in the West encouraging women to want things both ways: to choose a restrictive gender role and disallow anyone to have a negative opinion of them.

The need to frame something arguably negative as positive is observable in other choices women often make in the West, like cosmetic surgery. I would argue such a thing is disempowering capitulation to advertising and harmful beauty norms, but from a feminist perspective, it could be framed as a liberated choice. Maria’s family may consist of women with strong personalities⁵, but choosing not to work opposes the idea of an empowered woman for me. They were raised in a collectivist, hierarchical society, and Maria was raised in a more liberated one at odds with those mores. She can’t have it both ways, as I’ve learned from being in the Indian diaspora.

Men and women should both have choices

There’s a contradiction inherent in a liberal society between choosing ‘traditional’ gender norms and theoretical egalitarianism. Because of that impulse, women are expected to work, which is the most desirable path for women to ensure independence. Staying at home could be framed as disempowering or requiring someone else to pay for your existence. Given how expensive it is to live in developed countries/major cities, it’s not pragmatic for a woman to not work after her children are somewhat independent. I can see the logic on both sides, but I also think that choosing not to work should carry the consequence of taking the domestic labor. You can’t choose a role condoned by patriarchy and then frame it as a feminist choice. You either select egalitarian relations, or you admit that you’re choosing conventional gender roles and live with the consequences.

If you choose not to work, are you selecting shackles? The freedom to choose patriarchal gender roles should also mean that men can have a preference either way. Theoretically, they should also be free to decide not to work if their spouse agrees. But, society looks down on such men because, of course, they’re not fulfilling a normative role, and the punishment is far higher for them than for women in even the West. It’s almost as though women can break gender norms, but there’s a harsh penalty for men who do the same; men are often punished for being emotionally vulnerable by even feminist women. If men are allowed to have a preference, they shouldn’t be considered misogynistic if their choice conflicts with what the woman wants or what is normative. There’s a sense that whatever the woman prefers is the right choice, but that removes the option for the man. If an egalitarian society is sought, choices should be open for both sexes.

Ultimately, we live in a society that values women who work more than those who don’t. Earning one’s own money is the only path to freedom from having to marry. At the same time, gender egalitarian societies should afford choices to both women and men, and we should treat those choices equally. If we don’t, then we’re still falling into the trap of sexist norms and implying that certain decisions are invalid based on gender. I’m not the only woman to have observed that many women engage in double standards for men. If we genuinely want to change norms, that has to stop. Norms can never be destroyed because society is organized around them, but they can change. And having double standards only hurts the cause of gender egalitarianism. I’m sure someone will comment that egalitarianism isn’t possible or desirable, and I see the argument there because a person’s sex leads to fundamentally different experiences. But my choices seem to be between no freedom in a patriarchal society and self-determination in a liberal one. The answer is evident to me.

1. Check #feminism, #internationalwomensday, and related on Instagram and TikTok, and tell me I’m unfairly generalizing (some of you probably thought it).

2. Honor killings happen with shocking frequency in various Western countries, and the perpetrators are often South Asian men (of any religion). That is patriarchy, and it gets exported to countries that have largely rejected it. It’s the responsibility of those who support a gender-egalitarian vision of society to get mad about violence against women of all backgrounds. Yet, I never hear white affluent feminists decry it because the other tenets of the dominant ideology forbid it. And before you say that I’m making a straw man, I was exposed to only viewpoints pushing me to reserve judgment and not commit intellectual imperialism throughout my schooling. I honestly was taught not to judge other cultures for their treatment of women because we’d be imposing Western feminist notions of liberation on a culture that resists it.

3. See The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney.

4. There is a wide gap between people with degrees and those without. The degreed class will eventually hit a tipping point in which women dominate. But, those with degrees overall are still in the minority. And it should be self-evident that those with degrees command higher wages than those without because they’re qualified for the highest-paying jobs while the non-degreed are kept out with ridiculous gatekeeping.

5. Distinct from ‘strong women’