Opinion
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March 9, 2020 (American Thinker) — Here's a bit of background on the biggest complaint from young women today: how they are stressed, overworked, and underpaid and don't have enough time with their families.

Welcome to the “freedom” you were promised in the 1960s and '70s by people Rush Limbaugh referred to as “feminazis” for their strident, demanding, man-hating ways.

When I first married in the mid-'60s, my wife quit her job. This was the norm. Men worked, and married women stayed home to cook, clean, care for the children, and often handle family finances.

But the nuclear family was, and still is, seen by liberals as evil and unnatural.

People like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan gained fame by purporting to speak for women and insisting that they were oppressed and unhappy.

Friedan called it “the problem with no name” and said, “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban [house]wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'”

Friedan described herself as “a bad-tempered b—-.” Steinem once described her version of Utopia:

What will exist is a variety of alternative life-styles. Since the population explosion dictates that childbearing be kept to a minimum, parents-and-children will be only one of many “families”: couples, age groups, working groups, mixed communes, blood-related clans, class groups, creative groups. Single women will have the right to stay single without ridicule, without the attitudes now betrayed by “spinster” and “bachelor.” Lesbians or homosexuals will no longer be denied legally binding marriages, complete with mutual-support agreements and inheritance rights.

The prescribed cure for the problem with no name was for women to go to work and begin having more abortions. Politicians obliged with the demanded policies, and companies began to accommodate.

So today, married couples both work. Their children are in day care from the time they are infants — at a huge cost in both money and family cohesiveness, and the couples hope the nursery will care for them safely and properly.

The two salaries together equal about what the man used to earn. One of their salaries is used up by the need for a second car, day care costs, and other incidentals, including higher taxes.

Meanwhile, they juggle trips daily to and from day care, squeezing in time to go to the grocery; prepare meals; shop for clothes; and do household chores, which both now perform.

How onerous were the jobs previously assigned by default to the wife? A breeze in comparison to what their grandmothers faced.

Today, they do half as much at home, perhaps, but also work 40 hours a week or more in an office or other workplace.

But they've been “liberated.” So all is well and just.

This post originally appeared at the American Thinker. It is published here with the author's permission.