Countdown
Steve Sailer (“Booming Utah Needs Lower Wages and More Expensive Mortgages, in the Name of Feminism”) points out a Bloomberg piece on “Why Utah Can’t Afford To Keep Its 1970s Gender Gaps.” You can read it now and then follow up tomorrow with the blog posts by Mormons who wish there were more Mormon mothers away from home and in the work force.
Why, earlier this week there was even a Mormon website that, taking a break from tutting about the non-erudition of “ponderizing” and the lack of theological training of LDS leaders, sided with Hollywood Life and some reality TV show in condemning the LDS First Presidency as a bunch of stupid old meanies for requiring a child of polygamists to explicitly disavow polygamy if she wishes to be baptized. When is being too hard-nosed against polygamy a bad thing? When it’s the First Presidency doing it.
While I’m at it, here’s an interview from five years ago with Ruth Lybbert Renlund, wife of one of the new apostles: “Just Call Me Ruth”. Now we have an apostle leading the church and his wife who opted for heavy doses of daycare:
When Dale was a resident he had a demanding call schedule, on call every third night. You don’t just marry a person, you marry a lifestyle. So I was basically a single mother, and when I embraced that it became easier. At that same time he also was called as the bishop of an inner-city ward, so when he wasn’t at work he was doing Church business. I treated school as a nine-to-five job. I arranged for all of Ashley’s childcare, preschool, and after-school arrangements. I’d go to school, come home, spend time with Ashley, and then study at night.
[. . .]
Some days I had to be Mom and was home. Other times I had to be the lawyer and stay late at the office to take care of some work. Other times I had to be the spouse. It doesn’t equally play out each day. You have to respond to the situation that’s there. It was nice because my mom lived close and Ashley went to her house on Fridays when she had a half-day of school and got to spend time with her grandma and cousins.
The family model that Kimball, Benson, and Hinckley exhorted of one-income families with an employed father and a homemaking mother received no mention in our current manual on the teachings of President Benson, used by the Relief Societies and Melchizedek priesthood quorums. How will my children and their spouses seek to live after that model if the LDS church has ceased to teach it? Am I going to whisper privately to them about “old, purer ways” that even the church at large has forgotten, but we in our family preserve? That sounds divisive.
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John Mansfield
October 15, 2015
A Linked In profile for Elder and Sister Renlund’s only child, the 34-year-old Ashley Rendon (BA with Distinction and with Highest Honors from Stanford, 2002; MA from Harvard, 2006), says she is currently Manager of Content Technology at Elsevier Technology.
John Mansfield
October 15, 2015
Can anyone explain this line from the Bloomberg piece: “But with unemployment of just 3.7 percent in August and job growth of 4 percent a year, Utah can no longer afford to keep half of its population underemployed.”
The second half of the sentence contradicts the first half. Is this just a case of “How many fingers am I holding up? Four or five?”?
Andrew
October 15, 2015
They’re implying that, because unemployment is *below* job growth – which in all other circumstances is an amazing thing for people, leading to an increase in wages – is here a *bad* thing, because it means corporations would have to raise wages to get good employees. They want a huge pool of unemployed people to draw from, apparently.
Bruce Charlton
October 15, 2015
Sometimes I think it’s almost as if the mass media are a wee bit dishonest about things.
Maybe I should write a book about it…
Screwtape, Sr. Tempter
October 15, 2015
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I note what you say about guiding our patient’s reading …
But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the
Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew
pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still
connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But
what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever
since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think
of doctrines as primarily “true” of “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”,
“conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time
trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the
philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
Wilhelm
October 16, 2015
Your last paragraph sums it up for me. Why, oh, why are these teachings being excised from our manuals and conference messages? I would fear much less for the future of our people as a people were there still strong doses of the-world-be-damned teachings on the necessity of mothers in the home and fathers as primary providers, and on parents being as fecund as nature and their worldly resources allow.
Wm Jas
October 16, 2015
Most depressing sentence in the article: “Utah ranks last in the U.S. for the percentage of mothers with young children in the labor force, at 52.8 percent.”
When I was in elementary school, I remember that exactly one of my classmates had a working mother — and that was in liberal New England, not so many decades ago. Now even in Utah a majority of mothers have been “liberated”!
Bookslinger
October 17, 2015
Perhaps that battle has been fought and lost. It may be that at this point emphasizing SAHM-hood may keep out or drive out as many as it would keep in. If that is so, it may imply that this is the last generation before the 2nd coming.
(I’ve already concluded that legalizing SSM is an indicator of the last generation.)
John Mansfield
October 17, 2015
I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time a couple years ago, and one thing that marked it a product of the 70s was when Terri Garr playing a young housewife told her UFO-obsessed husband Richard Dreyfuss that she was not going to get a job to support the family after he was fired from his job; that was a duty she expected and required of him. Forty years ago, even Hollywood had the concept of normal working class, single income families. Now, even half of Utah has lost it.
T. Greer
October 17, 2015
I am younger than most commentators here. I am not yet married. But given economic realities I face, and salary projections for the future, I cannot imagine supporting more than one child on my income alone. Either my wife and I will have few children, or she will have to work.
For some reason the very real economic pressures young married couples face never enter into these discussions.
MC
October 17, 2015
“For some reason the very real economic pressures young married couples face never enter into these discussions.”
Never say never:
http://www.jrganymede.com/2014/11/18/large-families-large-houses-traditional-role-models-and-single-incomes/
Zen
October 17, 2015
The more dual income households there are, the harder it is financially for the single income households.
A few thousand years ago, we would have sacrificed a firstborn calf. Now we have things like this.
G.
October 17, 2015
Did you read the linked article, T. Greer? It’s not about families being forced into the workforce. I have a lot of sympathy for the plight of the wage earner. there are two families I know that I’ve helped through marital difficulties by sitting down with the wife and giving her a dose of reality about today’s economy. But the juggernaut of corporate feminism is evil.
yes, there are structural forces at play. but to a large extent, the single wage earner economy did not die of natural causes. and the killers are gathering, blood on their hands, concerned that the victim is still fighting for breath.