| By Dana Goldstein - Jun 13th, 2007 at 11:15 am EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
A reminder yesterday from Ben that all conservative cultural critiques have reactionary sexual politics at their core. Proselytizing for suburban sprawl, Reagan administration veteran Ron Utt
was once quoted in The New York Times denying that the sedentary lifestyle of suburbia contributes to obesity. Instead Utt points his finger at the washing machine, arguing, "you're fat for a lot of reasons, like the fact that you don't do laundry by hand."
It's just like a Heritage Foundation fellow to romanticize the days when soiled clothing was laboriously beaten with a paddle, scrubbed on a washboard, and then hung out to dry. It was women who did that work, both for their own families and as wage workers. And as anti-sprawl author James Howard Kunstler points out in Geography of Nowhere, it is women who so often get stuck shuttling children to and fro five times a day in our sprawling, car-dependent suburbs. The landscape of the 1950s all too often promotes the values of the 1950s.
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Since I’m far from an expert on the matter – and probably not even a worthy commentator being a male who doesn’t immediately notice how gender factors into public policy issues (e.g. transportation, housing, public health) – I’m curious to hear whether the “spatial design and material culture” of American cities are still in need of “a complete transformation,” as Hayden pointed out 27 years ago.
Why is that? Well, it's nothing inherent in gender roles, but more a matter of economics. In fact, *men* are disproportionately likely to retire and become the child-rearing house-husbands, provided their wife is making more than them when the baby is born.
Why does it tend to be that the husband is making more at that point? It's not a question of discrimination - the pay gap between childless men and childless women is rather small.
Rather, it's a question of preferences. At all income levels, whether working-class or elite professional, women overwhelmingly tend to seek out men who make more money than they do. Men, by contrast, are far more willing to accept a mate that makes less money but who attracts them in other areas.
Since the vast majority of the aforementioned women are not living in poverty, it's reasonable to say that they can certainly choose to switch up their preferences if they're unhappy with the end result. Ladies, envision yourself with a guy whose crowning goal in life is to eventually retire at age 30 and become a homemaker!