I'm sorry, but I call BS. Boys who were effeminate used to have the sh-t kicked out of them frequently, often by their dads. I would call this a traditional rather than a liberal or conservative issue, though my friends who had the sh-t beaten out of them mostly grew up in more conservative households. The idea that you had to be a certain way to be "a real man" who didn't cry, demonstrate emotion, all the stereotypes, is an old-school notion. From John Wayne to "The Godfather" -- "women and children can be careless, not men."
And you all really need to look at women today, who can be homemakers or working professionals or both. No one is telling us we can't, except for a few voices saying that children can't be raised right without a parent in the home, or that women should have careers to the exclusion of childbearing. I am a liberal, and a feminist, and I don't believe in that BS. Neither do my friends, the women I went to college with in an old-fashioned "girls school".
Once again, this does not need to be a liberal vs. conservative issue. It is a matter of rcognizing traditions and history, keeping things that work and letting go of things that don't.
I'm not sure where and how you grew up, but no one kicked their own boy's butt as part of any tradition in any family I knew.
I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family where my father made enough that mom didn't have to work and was free to be a homemaker. By no means did that constrain her from being politically active, and it gave her the freedom to not only raise and educate us (because what you learned in school wasn't always correct, nor complete) and encouraged us to take advantage of the rather large library we had at home. Without her counsel, wisdom, and care, I think we would have all turned out far worse, and had she bought into the often blatantly materialistic quest for unneeded income (because that second income was often optional in those days) and worked outside the home, as children we would have been deprived of that guidance and mentoring, not to mention not eating nearly as well.
What I saw happen as women became 'liberated' was inflation to the point where few households could afford to
not have both parents working. The price of housing and automobiles, the two serious big ticket items, went up as the economy transitioned from single wage-earner to dual wage earner, and the term 'single parent', whether widowed or divorced usually meant some level of impoverishment, to the degree that along with the "Great Society", welfare rolls and subsidized housing expanded, not just along the oft assumed racial lines.
There have always been women who went into professions, or who had jobs, and that was plenty acceptable back then, despite the whole myth of "barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen", and farm/ranch wives have been some of the hardest working of all, but the nurturing roles in our culture went to those who, traditionally (and biologically, at least for the first year) are better equipped to do so. As kids get older, they have learned from their fathers and their grandparents (because back then, the extended family was often involved). But I cannot honestly recall women being held back from any of that, at least not since Marie Curie, with the exception of the priesthood.
But the question isn't one of keeping women from pursuing professions they want to pursue. My question is one of (aside from economic necessity) whether women prefer working to being mom. The latter, well done, can produce lifelong rewards, and is imho, the most important job of all.
