Heidi Graw wrote:
> >"Mark Sobolewski" 
wrote in message
> >news:mark_sobolewski-97BDEC.19163724012005{at}news.central.cox.net...
> (snip)

> > Critical jobs, such as nursing, might be more serious of course
> > but even then, the doctors could be told they would have to
> > leave their offices for a few months and pick up the load
> > until men were trained.  They wouldn't like it, but tough.
> >
> > In other words, it would be ugly but hardly disasterous.
>
> Where are you going to get all the men needed to do all the work?

Hello Heidi,

We could get them, in time, out of the prisons that working class men
have been dumped into and forgotten while society poo-pooed over
the interests and needs of upper-middle class career women.

Also, as I said, a lot of this work would be redundant as consumerism
fell off.

> > In the meantime, how much does it COST society to hire women
> > in leau of available men?
>
> What available men?  The US already has an estimated 11 million
*illegal*
> workers and employers are still screaming for more.  Who is going to
pick
> the crops if all present men are plucked off the fields to fill the
offices,
> hospitals and clinics?

My wife just started work yesterday and she had to have all of her
documents ready to get a halfway decent job.

Seriously though (as if this newsgroup is ever NOT serious :-),
One of my pet peeves (of many, I have a lot of pets) is that
the same ideological thinking in the states that condemned men
for supposedly exploiting wives as "free" daycare and cooks
turned around and looked the other way when career women
cheaply exploited illegal labor to make their lifestyle possible.

Back to the farming issue: Theoretically, these jobs should be
filled by the men now in the prison system.  Basically, native men
are not finding these jobs paying a living wage which is why
they're mostly attractive to illegal labor.  Businesses often
feel a need to break the law because that's what is standard
in the market.

> >Let's add 'em up:
> >
> > 1) Welfare.  Millions of poorer women, in the states at least,
> > have children out of wedlock and into poverty because they
> > can't find a breadwinner man to support them.
>
> And by tossing these women off welfare, who is going to marry them?
Have
> you got millions of men lined up to take care of these women?

As I said above, nobody really gave a second thought to what would
happen to all the working class men who couldn't compete with
middle class women flooding the workplace...

Presumably, these women would go back to the working class men
who had supported them before.

Speaking about marriage: We both know what happens to 99% of the
men who don't have a decent job, eh?  How many liberated women
want to marry them?

> > For me, Heidi, I wouldn't weep if it all came to an end tomorrow.
>
> Mark, over 46% of the total workforce in the USA is made up of
women...that
> translates to about 65 million jobs.(Enc. Brit. Yrbk 2004).

Would it be difficult, yes?  Impossible?  Certainly not.

As I said, a lot of the workers in our economy are service jobs
that, while valuable, are not critical.  If McD's shut down for a week,
would you starve to death?  And as I said, a lot of these jobs
exist only to service these women.  And how much of that 46% is
working full-time compared to the other 54%?  How many work
overtime?

There's a reason men earn 1 dollar for every woman's 80 cents or so:
Men work the longer hours and do more dangerous and critical work
in order to be the breadwinner for a two parent family, something
99% of women are not capable of doing.  (Looking at it that way,
it's amazing the gap is only 20%!!!)

On the other hand, the expenses of the state and infrastructure to
support women's equality combined with the loss of men's productivity
(and the transfer of such men to the prison system) has a very
high cost for society.

I imagine that if it wasn't for women's liberation, we might all have
summer condo's on the moon by now rather than landfills filled with
Nordstrom's fashions and legal texts.

> The current
> unemployment rate wouldn't nearly make up for the people needed to
fill up
> the vacancies if women were to all of a sudden leave the work place.

Are you aware of the term "doing each other's laundry?"

I was educated as to the dynamics of the service workforce by a
manager of an oil tanker.  He needs, to run the ship, about 40
engineers,
sailors, etc.  But then, he asked me, who feeds these guys?  OK, so
now they need 3 cooks.  OK then, he asked again, what about the doctor?
With so many men, they'll need security.  I forget, of course, all
the jobs that needed to be done for employee support but it was quite
a bit.

Note that I'm merely engaging in an intellectual discussion at this
point similar to your quibble over the "clerical workers for
millenia" thing.  The question is whether women could be pushed
out of the workplace and would society handle it.  In the short term,
it would be VERY difficult but quite doable.  Pushing women ONLY
out of advanced careers is not only doable, but even possibly
economically
positive.

> Granted, some jobs may not be needed if all women were to stay at
home.
> However, even if social services (including health) were dismantled,
you
> would only lose 453,000 jobs...that's a pittance!

U.S.A. or Canada?

That's at the top Federal level but these programs then have
state and local divisions.

> Where the heck are you
> going to get the other 64.5 million *men?*

As I said, a fraction of those 64.5 million women need daycare and
that's FAR more than 500K.  That's another chunk.  Then there's the
fast food jobs that won't be manned because the women are cooking
at home.  Then there's the jobs in the transportation industry that
would lost because the women wouldn't be driving as much.

You get the idea.

Generally, as the oil tanker example shows, every time you add a worker
you then need to add more workers to support that worker.  The
women's movement certainly was welcomed by advertising executives,
investment bankers, etc. because they saw a lot of money flowing
around.

> The US would collapse if women were to remain at home.  I realize you
don't
> care, but millions of other people *do.*
>
> Heidi

Oh pulease.  If done gradually (not over 30 years, but even so much
as 5 years) people might barely notice. But I'll go out on a limb and
say that
all the factors I present above show that while initially traumatic, it
would
be VERY survivable.

But let's consider the opposite: Where would men go if they lost
their jobs in leau of female empowerment?  We already know 99% of
the answer to that question, don't we?  These men would need
a lot of cardboard boxes.

When you talk about caring, it would be neat to see some concern
about the needs of all the working class men who saw their lives
DEVESTATED or even the "oppressor" middle class white guys
who were laid off for the horrible crime of defending their
country and working hard to support their families in leau of
upper class white women who went to school paid for by Daddy
so she could marry a guy who earned at least as much as she did.

Another story: I don't make up the above example out of thin air.
My father was laid off of his job in leau of a woman who was
married to a wealthy provider.

The good news is that this saved his life.

All of the children had already moved out and the stress of the job
was killing him.  He got an early retirement and sold the home
(unbeknownst to him, at the top of the market) and bought a condo
in Fountain Hills, AZ at the BOTTOM of that market.  He spent the last
14 years of his life pursuing his hobbies and interests.
I couldn't recognize him from how he had been before.

Heidi, I'm willing to acknowledge I throw a lot out there and some
of it is not exactly supported by scientific documentation, but
I know how the REAL lives of people are being affected by all of this.
Sometimes, people don't always get to do what they want but
if they can at least do SOME of what they want, that's good enough
for most of 'em.  I don't have a lot of room in my working class
values system I was raised on to wait around 1500 years for
some ideology to work.  I'm happy YOU feel you have the space
and resources to feel safe for such pipedreams (by your own
admission.)  I happen to know there's a world out there of people
who don't.  Try thinking of them sometime if you don't want to
be surprised by the evening news 20 years down the road.
regards,
Mark Sobolewski



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