Roads not taken.

I've noted here before that I'm highly introspective.  Given that, I can't help but look at the road not taken, particularly when I'm oddly reminded of it.

Brian Nesvik was just confirmed as the Trump administrations head of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Brig Gen. Brian Nesvik.  His Class A uniform here (the horrible blue one that the Army has since ditched) shows him with a 1st Cavalry Division combat patch on his right pocket and what I think is a Combat Action Badge.

I'm not sure when most people start contemplating a career.  I sometimes hear people say the most unlikely things, such as "I always wanted to be a lawyer" or "I always wanted to be an actuary".  When I hear those things, I don't believe them unless the person is downright weird.

Existential occupations, however, are different, and I can imagine a person always wanting to occupy one of them.  I've defined existential occupations in this way:

Existential Occupations are ones that run with our DNA as a species.  Being a farmer/herdsman is almost as deep in us as being a hunter or fisherman, and it stems from the same root in our being.  It's that reason, really, that people who no longer have to go to the field and stream for protein, still do, and it's the reason that people who can buy frozen Brussels sprouts at Riddleys' still grow them on their lots.  And its the reason that people who have never been around livestock will feel, after they get a small lot, that they need a cow, a goat, or chickens.  It's in us.  That's why people don't retire from real agriculture.

It's not the only occupation of that type, we might note.  Clerics are in that category.  Storytellers and Historians are as well.  We've worshiped the Devine since our onset as a species, and we've told stories and kept our history as story the entire time.  They're all existential in nature.  Those who build certain things probably fit into that category as well, as we've always done that.  The fact that people tinker with machinery as a hobby would suggest that it's like that as well.

Indeed, if it's an occupation. . . and also a hobby, that's a good clue that its an Existential Occupation.

Being a soldier is, I think, an existential occupation, but only for men.  I'm not sure what to say about being a policeman of any kind, but I think that's likely the case for that occupation as well.

Growing up as a boy, one of the occupations I really wanted to do was to be a soldier.  It wasn't the only one I contemplated.  As noted here, I've always been really strongly attracted to agriculture.  Most days find me at my office practicing law, but that was never a childhood dream and it didn't occur to me at all until I was in college.  Law is the great middle class reserve occupation, truth be known.

At some point I began to struggle with my childhood desire to be a soldier.  It'd take me away from the state, which I didn't like the idea of.  I knew then, when I was more realistic about life choices than I am now, that I really couldn't hope for a career in agriculture, which is what I'd have done if I could have.  And the days of Wolfers and other professional hunters were long over, of course.  So around about that time, probably 13, 14 or 15 years old, I started thinking about becoming a Wyoming Game Warden.

I didn't give up the soldiering idea right away.  But it occured to me that I could become a National Guardsman, and stay here in the state.  So I hit upon the idea of going to university, then doing a hit in the Army as an officer, and then coming back out and becoming a Game Warden while staying in the National Guard.  This idea was so formulated in my mind at the time that I imagined myself entering the Air Cavalry, which at the time was a really cool branch of the Army, and the serving with the Army National Guard Air Cav Scout Troop in Cheyenne.

I was still on this track when as a junior in high school my father and I spoke about my career plans.  By "spoke" I mean a conversation that probably had three or four sentences in it.  My father wasn't big on career advice for reasons I understand now, but didn't really grasp then.  My mother was much more likely to voice an opinion about education and what I should do than my father, but I tended to flat out ignore my mother, particularly as her mental status declined with illness.  She'd have had me enter one of the hard sciences, which I in fact did (I guess I listened to her some) and go to a school like Notre Dame.

Anyhow, I told my father that I was going to study wildlife management.  He only mentioned that "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees that can't find jobs". That was enough to deter me from pursuing that degree right then and there, so rare was his advice in this area.

As it happened, I pursued another field of science but I did join the National Guard, doing so right out of high school as soon as I turned 18 years old.  One of the reasons I did that was that I also was contemplating being a writer, and I thought I'd probably write on history topics. As a lot of history involves armed conflict, being in the Army in some fashion seemed like a good thing to do in order to understand the background.

I was right.

Indeed, joining the Guard was the last really smart career decision I made.  I'm clearly not very good at career decisions.

To play the story out, I was a geology major.  I graduated with a degree in geology, and couldn't find work as the oilfield and coal industries collapsed (sound familiar, Wyoming?).  While at Casper College law was suggested to me by a history professor (I have so many credits in history that I coudl have picked up a BA in it with little effort) and it seemed like a good idea as I didn't know any lawyers and had no idea what they did.

Lots of people become lawyers that way.  Indeed, I know one other lawyer who became one due to the exact same advice from the exact same fellow.

But even at that, when I knew that I wasn't going to get a job as a geologist, I entertained picking up a BS in wildlife management. By that point, my father was supporting me in the goal.  Evan so, his advance five years prior stuck with me, and I didn't do it.  I ended up going to law school, and I ended up letting myself ETS out of the Guard, as I thought, in error, that law school is hard.

Law school, as an aside, isn't hard. Any idiot can graduate with a JD and pass the bar.  And while I only have experience with one law school, I dare say that this is true of any law school  Harvard JD? So fucking what?

Still, the idea resurfaced one more time.  A friend of mine and I went down to the Game Warden exam and I was offered a temporary summer job, the usual introductory way into the Wyoming Game and Fish Department at the time.  At that time, usually those who picked up summer work did it for a few years before being offered a full time job.  My wife and I had just gotten engaged, so I ended up declining the job.

Yes, I'm an idiot.

Well, not really.  But as noted, I'm not good at career decisions.

Brian Nesvik is a Casper native.  He  decided to become a Game Warden when he was fourteen years old and met a game warden on his first big game hunting trip as a licensed hunter.

He's 55 years of age now.  He's a graduate of the University of Wyoming where he received a bachelor's degree.  He was a member of the Wyoming Army National Guard from 1986 to 2021 and rose to the rank of Brigadier General.  Sources say he graduated high school from Cheyenne East in 1988, but I can't make that make sense.  I can accept it was 1987 and he was definitely in the Guard in 1986, the year I got out.  He's a 1994 graduate of the University of Wyoming, which would suggest that he did something else for awhile as even with the late 1988 date, that would have been six years after graduating high school.  I somewhat wonder if he had military service prior to going to university, but I don't know that.  He wears a 1st Cavalry Division DI as a combat patch, as noted, which is interesting.

His career as a game warden was very notable, and he became the state's chief game warden, the pinnacle of the game warden chain of command.  His military career is also impressive, noting the following:

Apr 18 Dec 21 Assistant Adjutant General, Cheyenne, WY

Jan 16 Mar 18 J3/7, Joint Fore Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Sep 15 Jan 16 G1, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Feb 15 Sep 15 Chief Facilities Maintenance Officer, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Jun 10 Feb 15 Commander, 115th Fires Brigade

Apr 09 Jun 10 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Camp Virginia, Kuwait

May 07 Apr 09 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 06 May 07 S-3, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Oct 05 Oct 06 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Feb 04 Oct 05 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery (FWD), Baghdad, Iraq

Oct 03 Feb 04 Executive Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Jul 02 Oct 03 S-3, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Aug 01 Jul 02 S-4, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Jun 00 Aug 01 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 97 Jun 00 Commander, Battery C, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Worland, Wyoming

Jul 97 Oct 97 Fire Direction Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 96 Jul 97 Platoon Leader, Battery A, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Gillette, Wyoming

Jul 94 Oct 96 Executive Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming

Jul 93 Jul 94 Fire Support Officer, Headquarters Battery, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Laramie, Wyoming

Jul 90 Jul 93 Fire Direction Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming

Dec 86 Jul 90 Flight Operations Specialist, 920th Medical Company (Air Ambulance), Cheyenne, Wyoming

His time in the National Guard and my own would have overlapped, but only barely.  My Guard service concluded in August, 1986, 39 years ago this month.

Shoot, by this time in 1986, I was probably just about to do my last Guard drill.

I wonder if Nesvik went to Korea with us?

Anyhow, it's interesting how something you thought of doing yourself, worked out for somebody else.

Indeed, frankly, I've known several for whom it did. Was I wrong in my analysis, way back when?

Well, maybe.  I was an indifferent high school student and sort of figured I would be as a college student too, which turned out not to be the case at all.  Externally, I look like a real success.

But then, we always have the backdoor view of ourselves, don't we?

 

This is an interesting article:

Catholic Parents: Free the Hearts of Your Daughters

The author of it, Leila Miller, had to know that she was really swimming against the tide with this one.

Indeed, I'm reluctant to even post on this, as there are a lot of pronatalist nutjobs out there right now that immediately latch on to such things.  But, here goes anyone.

Almost every Sunday I go to Mass at the same Catholic Church.  The celebrant there is an absolutely excellent homilist.  Probably most Priests give homilies that are good from time to time, but his are consistently great, which is rare in the extreme.  So much so, really, that I'd put him alone in this particular class in regard to those which I've personally experienced.

He's very orthodox, which doesn't keep a wide number of parishioners to attending his Masses.  In fact, for the first time last week, I could barely find a place to sit. I was attending with my daughter, who is about to go back to grad school.

Lots of weeks this parish features a fair number of young women wearing mantillas.  Not every week, however.  It's interesting . Some weeks they're all missing.  I don't know for sure, but I suspect that those are the weeks the Byzantine Catholic Church has Divine Liturgy in town.  The Byzantine Catholic service is conservative by default.

These are not the only young women there.  There are quite a few, but most dress like young women in this region do, if a little nicer.  My daughter, for instance, would never consider wearing a mantilla.  I know a few of  them, but only a few. There's the recently married nurse, whom I've known for a long time.  There's the young lawyer and her family.  And there's the girl working in the sporting goods shop.

The latter is particularly interesting as she just graduated high school about a year ago.  She's been working there for about a year as well.  Her concerned grandmother told me that she's been hoping that she goes to college and that she's very smart.  Apparently, she has no desire to do so.

Most of the young women I know, and I know them only barely, are either newly minted lawyers or friends of my daughter.  My daughter, as noted, is in grad school. Some of those young women are as well. Some have graduated from school already and are in the early stages of careers of one kind or another.  Because we live on the shores of jello belt, a few are Mormons, who are already married (Mormons tend to marry young) and have children.

There are a lot of misperceptions about Catholics, including Catholics and marriage.  Catholics do not, and never have, tended to marry young.  The opposite is actually the case.  My parents were in their late 20s and early 30s when then married.  My mother's parents were about the same.  I think my father's parents were in their early 20s, which isn't up there, but it's not as if its a teenage wedding either.    Anyhow, most Catholic women fit in to the general demographics for American women in general on these topics, although not strictly so.  The mantilla women are outliers.

What do they all hope for?

That's hard, if not impossible, to say. Each person's hopes and dreams are personal to them. . . but. . . well, within the confines of the nature of our species.

So perhaps they're more determinabel than we might think.

Non existential careers, which are most careers, are not really something that makes anyone fulfilled.  For that matter, they don't really make anyone actually happy.  But people are sold in the idea that they do.  Indeed, the way that comes in up in the subversive movie Office Space so frequently is what makes the movie actually profound:

Peter, most people don't like their jobs. But you go out there and you find something that makes you happy.

Joanna, in Office Space.

What feminist who yearned for careerism failed to grasp is that men didn't really want it either.  It was foisted upon them.

One of the things about the existential occupations is that they all existed when we were in our aboriginal state, t hat state not really being grasped by a lot of people.  People like to look back and think that we were "cave men" at that point, but that was never actually true for our species.  For most of our time here on Earth we lived as hunter/gatherer/farmers.  Interestingly, the farming aspect of this, which was t hought to have been a revolutionary development, was with us when we were still hunting and gathering, which should have been obvious as modern hunter/gatherers tend to also farm.  Those occupations have stuck with us in one form or another all along.

What also was with us was our basic natures.  No matter how you conceive of our species coming about, we've always paired up, male and female, and we've always had children.  Everything, in fact, centered around that.  While we imagine ourselves to be very complex, we really aren't.  That remains our basic natures and for most of us, defines, if you will, what we really want.  The existential occupations served that purpose.

Things began to become unhinged from that as we developed more complex societies, as once we do, something always goes amis.  Greed has a lot to do with it. Somebody will get into a position where he, and its usually a he, wants more of everything, food, resources, women, than anyone else.  Wealth always corrupts.

Still, even with more and more advanced societies over the centuries, it wasn't really until the Industrial Revolution that the basic nature of life started to be wrecked.  We should not idealize pre Industrial Revolution societies, which had plenty that were wrong with them, but something that wasn't wrong with them is that men and women tended to work close to the land, and close to each other.  A 17th Century English farmer, for example, might not be farming a farm he owned, or tending sheep that were his, but he was working close to nature and probably normally saw his family throughout the day.

The Industrial Revolution changed all of that.

Industrial capital needed labor and it took male labor, at first, out of the village and into the factories.  It's not that simple, of course, but the reasons that it was mostly male is.  Originally most industrial jobs required a fair amount of physical strength and endurance, which men have more of.  Where this was not true, it might be recalled, children and women were in fact employed, although that always meant, at first that they were poor.  

And, additionally, two other things were at play, one of which we've already touched on.

The first one is that biology worked against the conscription of women into the workforce at first.  There was noone to take care of children other than women and almost always those women taking care of the children were the children's mothers, for host of additional biological reasons.  The second one was that domestic life required female employment in the home.  There were exceptions to all of this, of course, but they were exceptions proving the rule.

None of this, however, goes against industrial employment being unnatural in and of itself.  Men whose fathers had come and gone throughout the day now left for industrial employment early in the morning and came back at night.  They didn't see their families throughout the day, and indeed, as time went on, teh gruelling nature of industrial work created a sort of mateship amongst blue collar workers that previously had really only been seen amongst servicemen.  When that occurred, it came to often be the case that when they got off work after a long day, the first thing they did was to hit a blue collar tavern, and then come home.   One lawyer's site on the net notes how the author's father worked a schedule like this, hit a blue collar bar every night, and cheated on his wife with the women found there, who would largely have been working there.

White collar and professional employment followed the pattern.  

If you look, for instance, at the practice of law prior to industrialization, lawyers usually worked out of their houses. Doctors did as well.  Indeed, almost anyone who "ran a business" outside of farming did.  John Adams, for instance, practiced out of the same farmhouse that he farmed from.  Once again, this meant that people were not really separated from their families much.

This even shows with some of the occupations that we regard as the wildest, or perhaps the freest.  Trappers in the American West, for instance, were married into native families at a high rate and took their spouses with them.  Career soldiers who made it to the upper NCO ranks, or who were officers, tended to bring their families to frontier posts with them.  

But as industrialization developed, the workplace industrialized.  Lawyers moved out of offices and into firms that moved into houses used only for that purpose, and then into downtown office buildings.  Doctors moved out of their houses into a professional building.  Every male began to leave early in the morning, and come home at night.

None of that was natural on a day to day basis.

The introduction of domestic machinery made much of the formerly necessary female labor surplus. AS that happened, they too began to be available for out of the home employment.  Between World War ONe and World War Two domestic machinery was revolutionized, but its introduction was retarded by the Great Depression, and then World War Two.  After the war, the new domestic machinery flooded the markets and female labor was released from the home at an enormous rate.

The only thing that kept a greater expansion of female labor in the workplace, and by this we mostly mean the office, heavy industry was still off bounds, was biology.  The pill took care of that.

The results were nearly inevitable, even if never expressly stated as desired.  Now that women could be free of biological reasons not to work, they soon had to work.  First generation feminists took up the cause in publications like Coso, which was basically the flipside of Playboy, with the same evolved message.  Joy and meaning was found in the (white collar) work place.  Sex was for entertainment. Your value is your work, and nothing else.  The same line of crap that men had been force fed for years wsa now force fed to young women.

Problem is, it's all a lie.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not stating that women should not work.  What I'm saying, really, is that men have to.  We have no other choice in the world, and most of us will occupy jobs that are just jobs, and nothing more., even when they are well paying.  But the basic nature of our species, that cries for the home to be the focus of our existence, and in which the old occupations still cry out, is unchanging.  And for women, part for that basic nature is to be mothers. For men, part of it is to be fathers.  

Being a mother remains a more demanding role than being a father, when children are young.  When they get older, this is less the case, but the entire "let's warehouse the children" nature of modern life is existentially immoral and we know it.  We managed to come around, in a capitalist society, to the same position the early communists did, and for the exact same reason, warehousing kids means the mother must work.

Not can, but must.

And the pressure to do so remains massive.  Nobody really advocates for women in this area, as it would men the actual return to a pre pill, pre first generation feminist, world outlook.  That'd be bad for capitalism as there would be fewer workers, and worse yet, consumption would decline.

But, frankly, that's' the way it ought to be.

I've already noted it once, but I was recently at a legal event in which there was a huge number of lawyers.  One thing that was noted was how many Catholic lawyers were there, which was in fact quite a few (Catholics here, however, are a minority).  Something I observed, however, is how many older lawyers there were.

On that, there was in fact a comment, from lawyer in his early 70s (maybe very late 60s) to another in his very late 60s.  "Lawyers don't like retirement".

If that's true, it's phenomenal.

I typed most of this entry out a while ago, but after I did it, Jerry Spence passed away, and I noted it here on the blog.  I'm not sure why I even did.  I guess it's just because he was a notable Wyoming figure.  After I did it, it occured to me that I don't think I noted the passing of former Wyoming Senator Al Simpson, who was also a lawyer from a long established family of Wyoming lawyers who have played significant roles in the state's history.  I should have.  He was quite a character.

One of the reasons that I'm a bit surprised that I noted Spence's passing is that I'm not a Spence fan.  I'm not a Spence enemy either, but the extent to which a certain group of people simply worship him astounds me.  Since he died, those close to him, semi close to him, and others who simply know his name have engaged in near hagiography about him.  I actually had somebody stop me just yesterday to related how they were deposed by Spence and his crew back in the day as a defendant in a case in which he represented a plaintiff.  You could tell he was proud of that fact, and obviously thought I would be really impressed.

I'm not.

I knew of Spence way back when I was in grade school, actually, which means back into some date in the early 1970s and I just don't get it.  I guess I don't get worshipping any lawyer.

I particularly feel that way as I am a lawyer.

Daniel Webster noted that “Most good lawyers live well, work hard, and die poor.”  I think there was a huge amount of truth to that.  There's still an element of true to it, but the "live well" part is pretty questionable..  

Working hard as a lawyer brings in less money than a person supposed, usually, and at any rate, lots of lawyers. . . and lots of other professionals for that matter, spend money as quickly as they make it.  As an oddity, right now, I drive the oldest vehicles of any lawyer I know.  I don't regard them as old, but the newest one I've had for twenty years.  The point is, a lot of people just burn through cash, and at a certain point, they have to keep working.

A bigger factor is, however, that the practice of law just burns out the core of a person's personality until, in many instances, there's nothing left.  Lawyers who have left the law often joke about being a "recovering lawyer", but at a certain point, there is no recovering from it.  All forms of work, if engaged in for a long time, or indeed any human endeavor you engage in for a while, changes you permanently.  It's part of your experience, and you are hardwired to react according to your experience.

I was going to go on and say more about this, but my original draft was extremely harsh, so I took it out.

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again.

Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. 28 years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything - or if it made any difference at all, really. Particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking's very healthy, but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!

Col Nicholson in The Bridge On The River Kwai. 

Related threads:

Work with meaning and the meaning of work.

Labels: Commentary, Daily Living, Distributism, Existential Occupations., Mid-Week at Work, Retirement, Subsidiarity, The Practice of Law, Women, Work

A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death, and the Good Life and Existential Occupations.

Labels: Agrarianism, Christianity, Death, Existential Occupations., Health, Hobbies, Introspection, Killetarianism, Medieval Europe, Mid-Week at Work, Old Age, religion, Retirement, Work

Monday, February 23, 1925. Puyi moves.

Deposed Chinese Emperor Puyi accepted a Japanese offer of projection and moved to the  moved to the Japanese concession of Tianjin.

An item from Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today sub:

Truly awful.

It's really the early 1920s, not the 1970s, that gave rise to a really powerful "women's liberation" movement, although you can find it building in the decades prior to that.  The 20s, however, saw it really blossom in much the same way that it would later, with much of the same goals.  As with the movement in the 70s, it met with some pretty nasty counter reactions.

Coeds themselves, meaning women in college, was a fairly new thing in this form.  It wasn't really until the post war economic boom of the 1920s that a lot of women began to leave home to attend college for a secondary education.  

I'm not a feminist, of course, but part of the horror of the Trump years is watching these sorts of attitudes creep back in and begin to be expressed openly.

Last edition:

Saturday, February 21, 1925. A Republican President declares American Forest Week.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Art, Calvin Coolidge, Cartoons, Clothing, Conservation, Daily Living, Movies, Teenagers, United States Forest Service, Women

Carrie Gress and feminism.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day: Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day : A Celtic cross in a local cemetery, marking the grave of a very Irish, and Irish Catholic, figure....

In the afternoon, I went out fishing and took the dog.  On the way, I was listening to a podcast, like I'll tend to do.  It was a Catholic Answers Focus interview of Carrie Gress and it was profound.  I'll post on that elsewhere.  

Here is elsewhere.

The title of the episode, and it should be easy to find, is Can Catholic's Fix Feminism?  Gress' answer seems to be no, but what was so interesting about it is that she, as a woman who holds a PhD has had a career as a professor was frank on some things that we've addressed here repeatedly, but from a more academic standpoint, and she was able to thread them together. Without really expressing it the same way we have here, she's spoke on metaphysics, theology and evolutionary biology, as well as political science.

We've typed out all of that here, but without really including the Marxism portion.

Gress basic thesis is that feminism really came out of the same radicalism as Marxism, and adopted a Marxist view that women should be compelled to live to the male standard.  It didn't really free women at all, it forced them into the male world where they're now judged on how well the live up. . . and down, to it.  She dared to say something that's an anathema to modern Americans, that your career will not make you happy, and it very well may make you miserable.

Tying it in to Marxism is also a bit of an anathema of a topic too, to most, but if you look at it, it's hard not to go there, at least in a fellow traveler's sort of way early on.  To at least a degree, even if you want to just lighten it up, early feminism fits into the family or radical movements of the early 20th Century, all of which were pretty heavily dominated by far left thought.  Communism itself was very hostile to motherhood and marriage, and wanted to destroy the latter.  The early radical Communists were opposed to both, and Whitaker Chambers discusses in Witness.  The association, at least tangentially, is there.  And of course, as the far left saw human value only in terms of people being "workers", this makes sense.  The American far left still speaks this way today, with Bernie Sanders, for example, being in favor of warehousing children so that their mothers can work, adopting the traditional leftist view that a human's value is found only there.

We've dealt with all of this before, of course, and frankly we've taken it one step further.

Feminism, its battle, grasped the economic nature, and the prejudicial nature, of men having every career open to them and women not having it. But they never looked for a second at the history of how that came about.  The assumption always was that men had grabbed these occupations for themselves and retained them by brute force.  In reality, however, the vast majority of male occupations had been forced upon them.  Where this was not true, in and in the original professions (law, the clergy, and medicine), the circumstances of Medieval life and biology, where in fact women had far more power in a generally more equal society than that of the early industrial revolution, caused this to come about.  

Failing to understand this, feminists created the Career Myth, which is that not only did men make a lot more money than most women, which was true, but that a career was the gateway to secular bliss.  Find a career, women were told, and you'd be perpetually happy.  Promotion of the myth was so skillfully done that it became a culturally accepted myth by the 1980s.  Even well into the 1980s, young men were told that they should work to find a "good job" so they could "support a family".  The idea almost universally was that the point of your career was to support a future family.  Almost nobody was expected to get rich, and frankly most professionals did not expect to.  Already by the 1960s the next concept was coming in, however, and by the 1990s the concept of Career Bliss had really set in.

The problem with it is that it's a lie.  Careers can make people miserable, but they rarely make most people happy.  Perhaps the exceptions are where a person's very strong natural inclinations are heavily aligned with a career, and certainly many female doctors who would have been nurses, for example, have benefited from the change, as just one example.

We are so in the thick of this that we hardly appreciate where we at on these matters now.  But this explains much of the misery of the modern world.  We don't live in accordance with our natures, or at least very few of us do, and we're really not allowed to.  An aspect of that is this topic. Women have careers open to them, and should, but they are now compelled to act like men within them, in every fashion.

I've recently had the displeasure of witnessing this in a peculiar fashion.  It hasn't been a pleasant thing to observe.  The interesting thing is that in observing it, when people feel free to make comments, they grasp their way back to the old standards, as with so much else, even while not living them.

Related Thread:

Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?" Looking at women (and men) in the workplace, and modern work itself, with a long lens.

Labels: Agrarianism, Capitalism, Career Myth, Distributism, Playboy Philosophy, Sexual Revolution, The relationship between men and women, Traditionalism, trends, Women, Work

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgist Part 14. The Industrial Revolution and Child Care and other musings.

children, Ethnicities, Marilyn Monroe, religion, The 2021 Insurrection, The Law of Unintended Consequences, The relationship between men and women, You heard it here first, Zeitgeist

If you wonder what is giving rise to the strong populist/Christian Nationalist/Naotional Conservatism reaction in some quarters . . .

 it's complete crap like this:

Theorizing White heteropatriarchal supremacy, marriage fundamentalism, and the mechanisms that maintain family inequality

The abstract:

Abstract

In this article, I draw upon critical feminist and intersectional frameworks to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages White heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs) and marginalizes others as a function of family structure and relationship status. Specifically, I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy. Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family. But it is also a hidden or unacknowledged structural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States. Through several examples, I demonstrate how—since colonization—marriage fundamentalism has been instantiated through laws, policies, and practices to unduly advantage WHNFs while simultaneously marginalizing Black, Indigenous, immigrant, mother-headed, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) families, among others. I conclude with a call for family scientists to further interrogate how marriage fundamentalism reproduces family inequality in American family life and to work toward its dismantling. A deeper understanding of how these complex and often covert mechanisms of structural oppression operate in family life is needed to disrupt these mechanisms and advance family equality and justice.

Marriage is a human universal.  It's not "white", and indeed "white" doesn't really exist either.  When people say "white" they mean Western European culture, maybe, or maybe they mean American European culture. Or maybe they just don't know what they mean and are in fact simply reinforcing the language invented for the more recent form of slavery that existed in North American until 1865.

Anyway you look at it, when you wonder why people go in and vote for Trump, well, stuff like this has an awful lot to do with it.

Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?" Looking at women (and men) in the workplace, and modern work itself, with a long lens.

Soviet realisim painting depeciting sorting grain. While hopelessly romanticized, the depiction of women in this work is accurate, and would have been fort the pre Soviet era as well.

A tired, discouraged Tik Toker young woman has gone viral with a post, in which she says in tears;

Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . .  why did you do that?

I am so tired. . . I want to put my feet up. . 

She says it, struggling back heavy tears.  

A couple of things before we go on to analyze this topic, and people's reaction to her cri de coeur.

First, my initial guess was that this probably would have resulted in a flood of people making fun of the young woman, but in fact, there isn't much of that.  Lots of women actually posted back with complete sympathy.

A few men posted, too, in this one instance, stupidly:

Jacob McCoombe

Who thought ANYONE should have to work? We should all be sitting on the beach eating cheese and wine 😭

6-61453Reply

AtticusMax123

but... there would not be any cheese or wine .. 😱

6-9 64Reply

Jacob McCoombe

I’d classify it as a hobby. If I didn’t have to work, I wouldn’t mind at all making homemade cheese and wine

6-950 Reply AtticusMax123

but that's work. it's where we have gone wrong. all worried about money, instead of worrying about actually enjoying and being passionate about

Ahh. . .that age old belief that farming and agriculture is not work. . . from urbanites.  Farmers, of course, believe hte same thing about people who have office jobs in town.

But I digress.  

Quite a few replies were like this one:

Fr why did they do that🤨 I would have been completely chill running a household cooking, going shopping, cleaning stress free like ugh I hate working

One of the most interesting replies was this one:

🥀𝐸𝓂𝒾𝓁𝓎🥀

we just wanted the option we didn’t want to HAVE to work 😭😭😭

So I'll start my comments here.

Secondly, therefore, the question, answered straight, and then I guess through a technological analysis and economic analysis. . . or I suppose I'll look at all of these simultaneously.

Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . .  why did you do that?

Well, proto feminist and early feminist did that.  The reason that they did it, as understood by them at the time, was that they lived in a world that had been heavily impacted by industrialization which had removed men from home based enterprise, for the most sake, and sent them off to "work places" of various types during their working shifts.  This vested economic power in men, and in turn the economic power equated with political power and societal power.  Arguably, it was the power aspect of this that most concerned early feminist and proto feminist, as that imbalance of power worked heavily to the detriment of women in all sorts of ways. 

At the same time, however, technological advances made women's labor in the homes greatly reduced, as we have described here:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

So, basically, feminism rose up in the 20th Century as part of a long, slow, female emancipation movement that began prior to the Civil War but which really took root in the very late 19th Century and very early 20th Century just as technological changes made it possible for fewer women to be required to be employed in the household, a necessity which had greatly increased, ironically enough, when industrialization mandated men to leave the household.

Put another way, consider this.  Once men worked in factories, or town jobs, there was no way that they were really available to lend any kind of hand with domestic matters.  This was so much the case, that boarding houses were a staple of men's lives if they were single.  Indeed, they were so much a staple that they inspired a long-running cartoon which would now make no sense to most Americans.

Indeed, boarding houses were so common that they were the souse of a folk song noted by Mark Twain, which went:

There is a boarding-house, far far away,

Where they have ham and eggs, 3 times a day.

O, how the boarders yell,

When they hear that dinner bell

They give that landlord –@#$3

Three times a day.

– The American Claimant, Chapter 17*

This brings up another aspect of this, however.

Delia Kane, age 14.  The Exchange Luncheon, Boston.  January 31, 1917.  

Women have always worked, and some women have worked outside their households for time immemorial.  Indeed, as the thread linked in above discussed this:

You an find varying data, but it's all pretty close, what it tends to show by decade is the following, with the categories being year, numbers (thousands) employed, percentage gainfully employed, and percentage of the workforce over age 16.

1900 5,319 18.8 % 18.3 %
1910 7,445 21.5         19.9
1920 8,637 21.4         20.4
1930 10,752 22.0         22.0
1940 12,845 25.4         24.3
1950 18,389 33.9         29.6
1960 23,240 37.7         33.4
1970 31,543 43.3         38.1
1980 45,487 51.5         42.5

This doesn't really take into account the spike in employment during either World War One or World War Two, which may be significant in that it tends to potentially be overemphasized.  Taken out, what we see is a slow increase from 1900 onward, which coincides with the rise of domestic implements.

If we figure in the years after 1980, it might be even more revealing.

1980 45,487 51.5     42.5
1990 56,829 57.5     45.2
1993 58,795 57.9     45.5
1994 60,239 58.8     46.0
1995 60,944 58.9     46.1
1996 61,857 59.3     46.2
1997 63,036 59.8     46.2
1998 63,714 59.8     46.3
1999 64,855 60.0     46.5
2000 66,303 60.2     46.6
2001 66,848 60.1     46.5
2002 67,363 59.8     46.5
2003 68,272 59.5     47.0
2004 68,421 59.2     46.0
2005 69,288 59.3     46.4
2006 70,000 59.4     46.0
2007 67,792 56.6     46.4
2008 71,767 59.5     44.0
2010 71,904 58.6     53.6 (which is another watershed year in that the majority of the                                                                     workforce became female and stayed that way)
2014 73,039 56.9     57.0

If we do all of that, we find that the number of women gainfully employed doesn't reach 50% at any point (including WWI and WWII) until 1980 and that it peaked for several years at 60% starting in 1999, before dropping down slightly.

That's correct.  Nearly 20% of women worked outside their households as early as 1900.  

Of that remaining 80%, at that time, you have to keep in mind that the farm population was much higher than it is today, its decline as a percentage of the population being one of the sad realities of the barbarity of modern life.  Even this is a bit deceptive, however. PBS's American Experience relates the following:

1870 The 1870 census shows that farmers, for the first time, are in the minority. Of all employed persons, only 47.7 percent are farmers. As farming becomes more mechanized, farmers rely more on bank loans for land and equipment.

1880 U.S. population reaches 50,155,783, with farm population estimated at 22,981,000. Forty-nine percent of all employed persons are farmers, and of those, one in four is a tenant, despite the Homestead Acts. With the development of barbed-wire fencing and windmills, plow farming reaches the Great Plains.

1893 U.S. experiences an economic crisis: 642 banks fail and 16,000 businesses close. As produce prices plummet, tens of thousands of small farms go under.

1900 There are 5.7 million farms in the U.S., with an average size of 138 acres.

1920 The number of farms has grown to 6.5 million and is home to roughly 32 million Americans, or 30 percent of the population. This would soon change. Migration, mostly by young people who left for the cities, escalated over the next ten years.

What this shows us, of course, is that farmers as a percentage of the American public peaked in the late 19th Century, dropping to 30% by 1920.  1919 was the last year of economic parity for American farmers.  Still, for our discussion here, this is significant.  1920 was the year that the 19th Amendment was ratified in the United States, and women got the right to vote throughout the country.  At that time 20% of women were employed outside the household, and approximately 30% of them lived in farm families, and women in farm families most definitely worked.  That would mean, therefore, that about 50% of women were actually working in some fashion in addition to maintaining their households, and that's at a bare minimum.

Indeed, if we consider the fact that family run businesses were much more common in the first half of the 20th Century than they are now, that figure increases even more.  For families that owned small businesses, whether they be stores, or restaurants, etc., the entire household was employed in them in some fashion.  There may have been a division of labor in those households, but it was not as great as might be imagined.

Even for professionals, this was true to some degree.  Doctors, for example, frequently had their offices in their homes up into the first quarter of the 20th Century.  Medicine was more primitive to be sure, and the practice was not as lucrative as it was to become.  Quite frequently, jobs preformed by hired help today, were preformed by a spouse.  A person might expect the receptionist, for example, to be married to the physician.  "He married his nurse" or "he married his secretary" was a common line for doctors and lawyers, and other professionals. The businesses were much less lucrative, and the family connections, and the natural inclination for couples to work together well expressed.

So, in terms of "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . .  why did you do that?", well, women didn't have to fight for "jobs".  Having a job, one way or another, was a condition of life for most women well before women are regarded as having entered the workplace.

So what's up with that perception, then, we might ask as our third topic.

Well, what's up with it is that as farming as the primary occupation of people declined, and men began to have no choice but to work in other capacities, an unnatural economic division of resources occured. A division of labor, quite frankly, is natural.  Men and women really are different, vegan eating emaciated weenies views aside.  But men working daily away from their families are not.  The economic power, therefore, vested in men, and that created an odd unnatural living condition that still prevails in some quarters.  The Rust Belt life of going to work in the factory early, for a good paycheck, getting off work late, hitting the bars with the guys in the Rust Belt Tavern where the workers would get blotto and make wolf whistles at the bar maids, before going home blitzed and demanding dinner from their wives came about.

And while that is clearly an exaggeration, it's not all that unrealistic of a depiction of the height of the American blue collar era.  The point isn't to unfairly condemn it, but rather to note that money, the motivator for crawling out of bed every day and heading to the GM plant, vested primarily in the hands of men and not women. That was a problem.

In addition to that, what we've already noted above occured.  Domestic machinery came about, which made female household labor surplus.

While we haven't addressed it yet, of the 50% of women not employed on the farm or outside the home, the remainder tended to be actually "employed" in the true sense of the word, in the heavy labor of just keeping a household going.  Indeed, the 20% that were employed outside the home tended to be actually employed, as maids and servants, in the houses of those who could afford it.  And employing domestic help was surprisingly common.

Americans of a certain age will have watched The Andy Griffith Show, in which, of course, Aunt Bea is a resident of the widowed Sheriff Taylor's household, and acts as the woman of the house.  In the very first episode of the show, she's introduced when Taylor's prior live in female servant has left to get married.  Sheriffs don't make a vast amount of money, of course, but the audience would not have thought this odd, as it wasn't that unusual.  Other television depictions of the same era have similar depictions.

In my own family, my mother's family in Montreal employed several domestic servants.  Now, in fairness, they were doing very well at the time, but again this wasn't unusual.  With a large number of children, and before our current era in every way, she employed a collection of Québécoise who cooked and cleaned in the house.  They were not servants, in the English manor house manner, but domestic labor.

And this gets us to the next facet of this discussion.  Prior to the 1950s, and even well after that, female labor outside of the household fell into a fairly limited number of occupations, and that is what feminist were struggling against.  Women of lower means, including married women, often found employment as servants and maids.  By the first quarter of the 20th Century, they were finding employment in offices.  Poor women found employment in certain types of factories, often featuring extremely dangerous working conditions.  Women of greater means, but not wealth, had teaching and nursing open to them.

Indeed, it is that last fact that demonstrates what really occured, and what the "fight" was actually about.  Young middle class women finishing school, and more women than men finished school, who wanted to work could choose to teach or nurse.  If they were Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican (Episcopalian) or Lutheran, they might choose to become nuns.  We don't tend to think of Protestant denominations having nuns, but they in fact do, and this opens up another aspect of this.  Nearly all women married at the time, and nearly all women still do.  It's a natural institution.  But not all women wish to marry.  Just as we've discussed with the topic of male homosexuality, religious institutions offered an acceptable way to avoid marriage and still have a career.  That may well mean that not all had deep religious vocations (certainly most did), but that was an honorable path for them.

What was not possible, generally, was to become a physician, lawyer or the like.  Professions were closed to women.  Most occupations outside of those noted were, which was a legacy byproduct of the early stages of the industrial revolution.  Men were forced outside of the home for heavy labor, but some had the option of working outside the home in "desk jobs".  While these jobs were in particularly less subject to gender differences than those involving heavy labor, the concept that they were was absent and women were excluded.

Eliminating that exclusion is what feminist were "fighting for".

That fight, we might tell our youthful distressed TikToker, was one worth fighting for.  In the end, it's not that the fight was to allow her to work, the fight was to allow her to work at something other than scrubbing floors.

But all battles are always subject o the law of unintended consequences.

Feminism, its battle, grasped the economic nature, and the prejudicial nature, of men having every career open to them and women not having it. But they never looked for a second at the history of how that came about.  The assumption always was that men had grabbed these occupations for themselves and retained them by brute force.  In reality, however, the vast majority of male occupations had been forced upon them.  Where this was not true, in and in the original professions (law, the clergy, and medicine), the circumstances of Medieval life and biology, where in fact women had far more power in a generally more equal society than that of the early industrial revolution, caused this to come about.  

Failing to understand this, feminists created the Career Myth, which is that not only did men make a lot more money than most women, which was true, but that a career was the gateway to secular bliss.  Find a career, women were told, and you'd be perpetually happy.  Promotion of the myth was so skillfully done that it became a culturally accepted myth by the 1980s.  Even well into the 1980s, young men were told that they should work to find a "good job" so they could "support a family".  The idea almost universally was that the point of your career was to support a future family.  Almost nobody was expected to get rich, and frankly most professionals did not expect to.  Already by the 1960s the next concept was coming in, however, and by the 1990s the concept of Career Bliss had really set in.

The problem with it is that it's a lie.  Careers can make people miserable, but they rarely make most people happy.  Perhaps the exceptions are where a person's very strong natural inclinations are heavily aligned with a career, and certainly many female doctors who would have been nurses, for example, have benefited from the change, as just one example.

The additional problem is corporate capitalism.

Corporate capitalism became so dominant in American society that by the 1970s it had swamped the original purpose of the economy and converted human beings into consumers.  Often missed in this is that while corporations need people to have enough money to buy products, it needs labor to be as cheap as possible, or even better nonexistent.  In this fashion, capitalism's two driving forces are actually pitted against each other.

Be that as it may, the freeing up of female labor from the household after World War Two was a boon to capitalism.  More workers within the same population meant reduced labor costs. Combined with a new societal imperative pushing women into the workplace, the rise of birth control which inhibited one of the primary reasons they were not, and the creation of a child warehousing industry, capitalism, along with socialism, drug women out of the household who didn't want to be in it, and put them into jobs which had little value in terms of the feminist dream of "fulfillment".

Indeed, the ultimate irony of the entire effort was that at the end of the day, corporate interest most benefitted.  Feminist never supported a movement that would "allow" women to work, but which actually compelled them to be required to, believing somehow that every woman who worked would find a high paying professional job.  In reality, doubling the workforce within the same overall population depressed wages in non-professional categories and ended up forcing all women to work, including in families in which there were children, which ended up being most families.  Feminism, ironically enough, had a mostly male view of the world, and a mostly Hefnerescque few of it, and the general assumption was that women wouldn't have children, and wouldn't even get married, but live a variant of the Playboy Philosophy, albeit without the huge boobs and dumb girl next store, but rather with an anorexic career woman in that role.

So in the new, in the dominant Anglo-American Culture, all women must now work and there's really no other easy economic option.  While plenty of families opt out of this, at least for at time, many cannot.  The big lie of "career fulfillment" has become a cultural norm, and interestingly enough has lead to personal misery on the party of many, who abandon all else for a career that, in the end, is just a job, but one without purpose or meaning.  And more than a few women have been left embittered by being forced into a labor/employment lifestyle that they resent and feel is unnatural.  Indeed, we've noted that here before:

Kay (momma of two)

@jacelala

·

May 6

I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.

So what does the TikToker do?  

We don't know, but it's apparently physically fatiguing.  A quick look at her TikTok page (and it is quick, as TikTok is weird) suggests that she works in something in which she interacts with customers, so perhaps sales.

So is her cri de cœur misplaced?

Well, at least partially, and probably substantially.  Unless she was born into wealth, and there's no reason to believe that, she was not going to escape all work in the first place.  The nature and the purpose of it would be different, however.  More likely than not, if she was her current age in 1923, she may have worked outside the home a bit, but then would probably find her work, and it is work, would be at home.  If it were 1823, on the other hand, or 1723, her work for her entire life would almost certainly be at home, unless she was born into severe poverty or wealth, neither of which seem to be the case.

So is her complaint about nothing?

Well, like a lot of female cries in this area, and there are a lot of them, the answer to that is no.  

One thing that the feminists crossed into, at some point, although they've started to cross back due to the unintended results of their success, was a war on women as women.  People remain people no matter what.  Truth be known, a lot of people don't want to be career people, they just want to live their lives and for a lot of them, those lives are close in their minds to the historic norm. The authors of Cosmopolitan may have imagined all women living lives of professional independence, sterile, and free of any commitments to anything, but sane human beings don't imagine lives like that.   So most people end up marrying sooner or later. Truth be known, in people's younger years, they spend a lot of time worrying about this topic and hoping to find somebody.

But the world brought about by the Sexual Revolution and the Feminist Revolution doesn't really accommodate that very well.  So women who would have preferred the more traditional roles are punished as society won't allow for it.   Beyond that, the logical conclusion of a sexless society is a gender bending one, and we now see disturbed men trying to cross into female status, as in spite of everything women are allowed societally breaks on the demands that men still remain subject to.

In the end, while things were achieved that needed to be, perhaps in part because of the era during which they were achieved, they were overachieved.  Women were allowed ultimately into every role, including some, such as combat soldier, which history and genetics would naturally preclude.

All in all, what we've never figured out is how to deal with the aftershocks and destruction that followed in the wake of massive societal change in the West following World War Two, and more particularly the Revolution of 1968.  As societies don't really tend to debate what direction they're headed in, at least cleanly, this creates a titanic mess.  But stepping back from one sad girl with sore feet, what we should be seeing is a host of things.  One is that feminism combined with Hefnerism, pharmaceuticals and corporate capitalism to the detriment of everyone.   The late stages of that contribute to the warp and woof of our times as the left pushes to destroy what remains of evolution and biology and the varying elements on the right grasp to restore it, without really understanding what happened.  Society isn't going back to any particular date in the past, and there never was a perfect one, but most likely evolutionary biology and deeply ingrained human nature will recover an awful lot of it, in some new sort of compromise.

Footnotes:

*It seems a little disputed, but the same tune may have been used by, or came from, There Is A Happy Land, which was a religious themed tune.

There is a happy land, far, far away,

Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day;

Oh, how they sweetly sing, worthy is our Savior King,

Loud let His praises ring, praise, praise for aye.

Come to that happy land, come, come away;

Why will you doubting stand, why still delay?

Oh, we shall happy be, when from sin and sorrow free,

Lord, we shall live with Thee, blest, blest for aye.

Bright, in that happy land, beams every eye;

Kept by a Father’s hand, love cannot die;

Oh, then to glory run; be a crown and kingdom won;

And, bright, above the sun, we reign for aye.

There is a Boarding House was adopted for the classic soldier's song Old Soldiers Never Die.

There is an old cookhouse, far far away

Where we get pork and beans, three times a day.

Beefsteak we never see, damn-all sugar for our tea

And we are gradually fading away.

Old soldiers never die,

Never die, never die,

Old soldiers never die

They just fade away.

Privates they love their beer, 'most every day.

Corporals, they love their stripes, that's what they say.

Sergeants they love to drill. Guess them bastards always will

So we drill and drill until we fade away.

It's worth noting that the Army, prior to World War Two, and indeed for some time thereafter, shared certain common features with boarding room life in that it was largely all male, and the occupataion took care of room and board.

Prior Related Threads:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

The Long Slow Rise. Was Lex Anteinternet: Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two.

A lamentation. The modern world.*

For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds. Generations: Part Three of Three

Blog Mirror: Harvard Business Review; What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class

Rerum Novarum