Feminsim Will NOT Survive the Industrial Collapse

[causticus]

I noticed an interesting comment on the Ecosophia monthly Open Post a few weeks back. It touches on a topic that I think very often gets dodged or ignored in the collapse-sphere, perhaps with the exception of Jim Kunstler's blog; he certainly has the stones to bring up topics that make most modern people very uncomfortable. I too might ruffle a few feathers with what I have to say here. Anyway, I procrastinated a bit on writing up something about it, but I figured I'd do so sooner or later. Anyway here's the comment:

FWIW, I think that modern feminism has a limited shelf life for the following reasons:
(1) Much of “womens’ liberation” is an artifact of modernity, and will not survive its passing. The main reason women can use men like wallets and sperm banks, then discard them when they are through with them, is that such women are actually “married” to the State, via modern welfare systems. When modern welfare states go away, so will the above life strategy.
(2) Radical feminist women (and Wokesters in general) are not having children at replacement rates. The only people who are reproducing at or above replacement levels, are more traditional (and usually deeply religious) groups of people. Since “the future belongs to those who show up for it,” I expect that more traditional sex roles will be re-established for that reason alone, if no other.

I strongly agree with this analysis. IMO, it's much more coherent than the usual Mainstream Right's responses to feminism, which usually amounts to pegging feminism as some kind of Marxist conspiracy that cropped up in academia starting in the late 1960s and then spread like a cancer onto the whole society, devouring of the Holy American Dream one savory morsel at a time. In fact, feminism is one among many of the productive of the industrial age. By "feminism" I mean in the most general sense, gynocentric identity politics and its various ideological iterations and activistic incarnations. Since there are in fact many different "feminisms," from this point on I will speak of the general doctrine of "gender equality" rather than continuing to invoke the rather vague label "feminism."

But first, I'd like to point out MG's response to this comment above:

Martin, to my mind it’s a mistake to treat things as this kind of either/or binary. There wasn’t just one set of traditional sex roles — check out the history of women’s legal status sometime, and you’ll find (for example) that the Protestant Reformation saw a dramatic decline in women’s legal status, with women being deprived of legal rights they’d had for centuries. When the welfare state implodes, no question, things will change — but that doesn’t necessarily amount to a lurch straight back to Victorian attitudes, you know.

Now, I don't think any and all criticism of postmodern sexual mores must automatically harken back to Victorian takes on this issue, but yes, I do agree that there is no one monolithic doctrine or practice of traditional sex roles. That indeed is a valid observation to make. Though this is not the first time I've seen "Victorian" used as a Strawman-mascot for traditional sexual mores across all pre-industrial cultures. When used in this manner, I think "Victorian" serves as a quick and convenient deflection from genuine criticism of the so-called "Sexual Revolution" and its aftermath. I believe the points Martin made in his original comment certainly qualify as genuine criticism. In reality, it seems there is a whole wide world between the extremes of severe prudishness / sexual repression and "anything goes" hyper-individualistic licentiousness, and most of that generous terrain I'd say squarely falls within the realm of traditional family arrangements and sexual practices.

I'll explain further. Again, I'll agree that there is no one monolithic doctrine or practice of traditional sex roles among the world's great cultures, BUT there is most certainly a common set of patterns we can easily observe among all cultures that have developed into notable civilizations. (Greece/Rome, China, Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, the Maya, among many others) They all valued marriage and stable family structures. NONE of them extolled the "virtues" of women or men running around and sleeping with a cornucopia of different partners. Few-to-none of them even tolerated the idea of sex before marriage. None of them promoted sterile/childless lifestyles as something positive or desirable for the average person. None of them ever advanced the idea that men and women are the same or that they should all work in the same occupations. NONE of these cultures championed women spending their most fertile years spending all day working outside of the household (maybe unless they were slaves or courtesans/prostitutes). No, those traits are those of our own modern industrial western culture. Some of these are also the sexual traits of a dying civilization (see: the fall of Rome). To defend the current/modern version of those attributes "just because!" is to engage in the sort of apologetics that involves lots of usage of the special pleading fallacy, or even the slippery slope argument like idea that any scaling back of modern gender egalitarianism means backsliding into the fields of that horrific Victorian strawman.

But back to the main theme of this post. The idea that men and women should be engaged in the same occupations is one that can only find fertile ground when we have machines and energy slaves doing most of our "back-breaking" work. The social classes today which most strongly promote "gender egalitarianism" are those comprised of people who mostly work in climate-controlled offices. We could say that office jobs are androgynous; which means they privilege neither the nature of men or women. If one's work-existence is limited to the office then they might indeed start believing that men and women can easily do all the same kinds of tasks. But take away the machines and their energy slaves and this delusion suddenly collapses like house of sand! Once we find ourselves back to those grueling pre-industrial conditions, then the sexual mores of olde' will be back with a vengeance. Men will be back to doing brawny jobs and women will go back to taking care of the household and other tasks that don't require a ton of muscle or life-threatening actions each day. But in general, men AND women will be working with their hands most of their waking hours. Both will be too busy and tired to be worrying about any sort of decadent or boutique identity politics; nor will there be any social media platforms left as an arena to spend one's waking hours fighting about these soon-to-be inconsequential abstractions. And no aspect of this impending future need involve any Victorian* neuroses. Neither does the future absence of a welfare state to subsidize the collapse of the family mean a return to Victorianism. But it does means that modern gender ideologies will cease to exist as anything the state (what remains of it) can or will enforce on the general populace.

Now, one more response in that threat I found to be interesting; one that ties into some of the points I made above:

It’s interesting when a couple makes a real attempt to live sustainably ‘off the grid’ (to a greater or lesser degree) they tend to go back to what some would term traditional gender roles. As you say, once you take away the safety net, and also machine labour, it is pretty simple that men are better/capable at some things and women are better at others, and thats where things tend to fall. Either sex has authority in their domain, and the other one helps out in ways they can.

What industrial society has done is to denigrate traditional womens ‘work’ and raised mens work to be overly important, so that a woman can only be ‘successful’ if she competes with men in the traditionally masculine fields. This is more to the benefit of the industrial system than individual women (or men).

Historically, mens task were actually less important day to day than womens. Mens tasks are traditionally high impact but only occur/succeed every now and then, like hunting, building the home, or defending the family.

Womens tasks were the care, maintenance and functioning of the family and without them the whole thing collapses.

Of course, these are generalisations and not locked binaries, and everyone has elements of male/female within them to a greater or lesser degree.

It would be interesting to follow up same sex couples living this way to see if the same thing happens depending on personal preference.

It's my view that the effort to confuse men's and women's work goes back to when Corporate America started admitting women into the workplace (and away from their families!!) en masse, and how they immediately framed this as a "women's empowerment" issue. No, in fact companies did this specifically to depress wages across the board. It's the old "scab labor" trick from the Robber Baron era. Only this time around, big business caught onto the idea that they could rebrand their labor-degrading practices as "social justice" causes. Ditto with illegal aliens doing manual labor jobs and any criticism of this practice is suddenly "racism." It's amazing how much the masses have bought into these lies and how easily they are fooled by these gimmicks time and time again. Though fortunately, more and more of us having been waking up to the truth on these matters.

I'll end this with the simple acknowledgement that this issue is super-sensitive and not easy to discuss around casual company. A "psychology of previous investment" (JHK term) has set in and now tens of millions of women (and many men) defend as a sacred cow the idea that the mass of women should spend their most fertile years being a cubicle serf. Supporting one's husband is now a high (cultural) crime, whereas being a slave to a corporate boss who doesn't give two flicks about the female employee in question is somehow ok. To me this attitude reeks as a type of Stockholm Syndrome plus lots of cognitive dissonance. But maybe that's just me.

---
*It is in my view, that Victorianism could be seen as a modern-age culture movement. Its "mores" are more a cartoon caricature of the traditional family and its values than an authentic expression of how traditional families manifested in the older agrarian nobility the Victorians fancied themselves as emulating. In a nutshell, Victorianism was cultural movement that came about as a modern industrial merchant-class (middle class) attempt to crudely approximate older aristocratic culture norms from previous eras. In essence, a very upright LARP. We could say this movement was something akin to the Hellenistic-era moralists like the Stoics trying to combat the decaying culture of their own era.

Comments

[methylethyl]

I think you're absolutely right about feminism being a product of cheap energy and the modern workplace. Even now, it's a lie that can only be sustained in the corporate office landscape. There are still a lot of professions that are almost exclusively male, and you don't exactly see hordes of women clamoring to sign up for those jobs either: commercial fishing, logging, welding, industrial painting, mining, road crews, electrical linemen, auto body repair, engine repair, diesel mechanics, HVAC repair, appliance repair, sandblasting, underwater welding, oil rig work, merchant marines... and whether people recognize it or not, our modern lifestyles are completely, helplessly dependent on the jobs these men are doing.

As a religious person, I'd *like* to agree with you that traditional roles will win out in the end, just because we have more kids. But the numbers don't work out. One of the things I get to see from inside one of the most conservative churches in existence is the annual church census. And the cliche is true: God has no grandchildren. Orthodoxy in the US is doing better than most other churches, in terms of retaining our young people, average age of parishioners, sex ratios, and overall number of active members year-over-year, but our numbers are still dismal: overall more funerals than baptisms. The kids go off to college and don't come back, for the most part. A few do. Everybody knows which ones they are before they leave for college, TBH, because they're the ones who are *already* deeply involved in the life of the church, and chose their college based on its proximity to a good church community they could join. But the majority don't stay in the church, and even among those who do stay in the church, most follow an essentially secular lifestyle. Their kids don't stay. When our parishes grow, it is mostly through adult conversion.

So... if traditional gender roles become more common in the years to come (and I think they will) it'll likely be for economic reasons, not because we more traditional types are having more kids. Just because kids grew up that way, doesn't mean they stay that way. Our young folks are just as susceptible to modern cultural mores as anyone else.

[causticus]

Great point about all those brawny professions industrial civilization still depends on for its very existence! It goes to show that the gender egalitarian ideology is almost wholly focused on office jobs. That just might be because the class that is most obsessed with said ideology tend to be the PMC office drones and paper pushers.

On the economic part, I'm afraid you're right. As of right now, PMC office jobs confer social status and kids going to college are told to pursue those jobs if they desire high social status. When things change enough to where being religiously-observant and family-focused gets higher status in the community than being office fauna then yes we'll start to see the younger generations gravitate more toward that lifestyle, and thus a more traditional mode of living.

[jprussell]

I think your key points that there are underlying realities that most traditional gender roles are based on and that demographics will play a key role are spot on. If I might add three things that I think are relevant to build on the above:

1) Back when I was in the army, a friend of mine of a rather conservative and religious persuasion lent me a book on traditional fatherhood. It made the excellent point that the "Leave It to Beaver" idea of "traditional" family values (or the Victorian one, for that matter, as you point out in your footnote) was actually a product of industrialization. In pre-industrial society (this book focused mainly on colonial America as a positive example), the womenfolk contributed rather a lot economically through cottage crafts like spinning, sewing, weaving, and so forth. As you and methyethyl above commented, these roles were respected, acknowledged as important, but as different from what men did to contribute. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name or author of the book and haven't been able to dig it up, and my friend can't find it on his shelf.

2) Coming directly from point 1), in that social prestige tends to be pretty tightly correlated with economic contribution, in your reply to methylethyl above, you mention that PMC office jobs are the high status jobs to get. Even in cases where you can work out alternate economically-satisfactory arrangements, a lot of modern women don't feel like they're living up to their potential or being valued, independent human beings unless they have a job that pays well and confers high status. Then you get into the trap of "if both parents are working, you need daycare, and if you want to pay for daycare, both of you need well-paying jobs" (ask me how I know about this one). As you say, as these kinds of arrangements become economically unviable, I expect a lot of return to mom, grandma, aunts, and neighbors watch each other's kids while the men go do physically demanding stuff outside.

3) One big factor that I think underlies a lot of what changed along with what will likely change again in a deindustrial world is readily available, effective, and convenient birth control. Having a liberated sexual life is a lot more desirable if you can be reasonably sure you won't end up with an unwanted baby and no one to help take care of it. When it comes to the sexual norms attached to gender roles, they tend to be some kind of negotiated truce between men's desire to not raise kids that aren't their own and women's desire to have a man (or more rarely, men) around to help take care of her and the kids. I suspect that as sex starts leading more reliably to kids again, women will start relearning the wisdom of "why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?" and men will start demanding some concessions of their own. Whichever groups or communities start figuring this out sooner will likely do better than folks who try to cling to either a childless life or unrestrained promiscuity.

If I somehow got to design the future, I would love for women to be able to retain the option to live whatever kind of life they want, and for men and women to be treated as equally worthwhile and worthy of respect, even if the default is that men and women tend to do different work, have different social lives, and so on. Given what times of decline and dark ages have looked like in the past, I don't have especially high hopes, but I guess we (and our descendants) will see.

[causticus]

1) That books sounds kind of amazing, ngl

2) I think that future historians might regard the two-parent income arrangement as the biggest scam ever pulled on the American populace. And after that, centrally-run public schooling as one of the greatest evils of this era. These schools should more appropriately be called daycare prisons and government indoctrination centers.

3) Yeah, I expect "lifestyle choices" like casual sex and hookup culture to largely disappear once cheap and readily-available birth control is no longer all that available. On traditional gender roles, I think they are largely based on many millennia of lessons learned through trial-and-error mixed with careful observation of human nature. I would wager the various experiments of our own "sexual revolution" have been tried many times in the past and have been reliably proven to fail. Thus the failures make their way into various cultures mythological tales, philosophical discourses, lists of maxims/proverbs, and religious literature. To leave this point off on a humorous note, in the past "having a liberated sexual life" was generally something reserved for kings and wealthy aristocrats, FWIW.

On that last part, I'm inclined to feel the same way. I do think that choice is important and that of course not every woman (or man!) wants to have kids and that this decision should be respected by the society around them. Having said that I think the average man and average woman desire to have families. Childless lifestyle niches have always existed in most civilized societies, and people who chose to go this route can live this way as valuable contributors to their communities.

[jprussell]

More on 1), since you expressed an interest:

At the time, I found it intriguing, but maybe didn't buy into it whole hog. These days, I really wish I could re-read it in light of some of my changed beliefs and worldview. I've tried searching Google Books by a variety of keyword combinations and haven't been able to find it. That being said, the main themes were roughly this:

1) As mentioned above, "traditional" gender roles as understood in the late 20th century are actually way newer than most of their advocates claim. Instead, patriotic, conservative Americans would do better to look at the colonial period for inspiration.

2) According to the book (as I remember it 10-12 years later), men's role in colonial America was something like this: work in the field (or at a full-time craft, like blacksmithing or woodworking), handle pig and larger livestock, handle external financial transactions, represent the family in the community and politically, and educate the children (especially religiously). Women's role was: care for small children, do cottage crafts, cook, clean, manage non-political social life with neighbors, handle gardens and poultry, teach kids basic manners and social graces.

3) Drawing on the above, both men and women had important economic contributions to make and important childrearing responsibilities. This meant that neither men nor women looked down on childrearing or on making money, and neither could claim to be dominating any field of building a household.

4) Combine this with the social expectations and courting behaviors of the time, and you acutally tended to have well-paired married couples who supported and respected each other, where each had prestige and respect for different reasons and both contributed to a succesful household economically and socially.

One reason I wish I could track the book down is that I would love to explicitly compare it to Seed of Albion. There's every chance that it was painting things in a rosy light to make its point, but many of its points are congruent with Seed of Albion, and the different perspectives would be interesting to hold against each other.

[causticus]

Fascinating. I'll have to read up more on colonial period family and community arrangements.

[methylethyl]

1) Ivan Illich makes this point in his book "Gender". But I've never seen this laid out more clearly than in Elizabeth Wayland Barber's book "Women's Work"-- which is a history of weaving and textiles.

[jprussell]

Thank you! I'll check both out.

[illyria2001]

Most women don't want to use men as sperm banks...actual sperm banks are much better for that, because the males involved aren't interested in custody of their progeny or using them to get back at their ex's. And the idea that modern feminists only want men for this, or for their wallets? Ridiculous. Feminism is the *reason* that women can make their own money that goes in their own wallets. If you keep women out of the workforce so they have to depend on men to survive economically -- so they won't starve or end up on the streets, homeless -- that's what will lead to women seeing men as only a meal ticket or three hots and a cot! Women do not want to tie themselves to men who can throw them and their children out on the streets as a whim (for example, if the man finds a younger woman and he wants to trade up, or if the current wife gets sick or isn't as pretty anymore -- I'm lookin' at you, John McCain). Women who are in the workforce and make their own money aren't the gold diggers that so many men worry about. If these women are with you, it's because they actually want to be with you, not because they'll starve or die of exposure without a man (any man).

[causticus]

The central point here is right in the title of this post; that modern feminism and the various things its spokespeople claimed to have accomplished under that ideological banner will cease to exist once the cheap oil is all gone. No more welfare state, and no more big business (or govt. agencies and NGOs) with its cushy office jobs and nebulous "makework" pseudo-skills that confer artificial status, will mean that men and women by and large will go back to being dependent on their own immediate locales, land, and home/ family environments for sustenance. With most of the office jobs gone, most work will become gendered once again. And as alluded to in an above comment, if modern medicine goes the way of the dodo, that means industrial-scale birth control will cease to be, which means, well....you can fill in the rest.

The sentiments you express in your comment just assumes the current situation, (i.e industrial civilization and its monumental energy consumption habits and economies of scale) is the only reality worth talking about. All the wants, whims, pop/mass culture opinions, techno-superstitions, and ideological fads that come along with that arrangement will become totally irrelevant once industrial society can no longer sustain itself. Yes, that means women who have children will be economically dependent on their husbands and extended families once again, for the most part. And most men will have to bust their balls all day long, in addition to taking on the risk of dying in a war.

BTW, women worked long before modern ideological fads like feminism came along.

[methylethyl]

OTOH, it also means children will likely return to being economic contributors to their households, rather than economic burdens from 0-18, which does balance things a bit. Yes, you have kids. But kids are valuable. It'll also likely mean a return to multigenerational households with more than one adult woman-- so the work is often shared between wife/mom, grandma, and any unmarried young women and spinster aunties. Plus, it's traditionally expected that elders will be financially and materially supported by their children. The kids are the retirement plan, insofar as there are such things-- even the old folks contribute to the household, they just don't do the heavy lifting.

This was an eye-opening thing I observed while traveling in the developing world and staying in the homes of farmers and laborers. Yes, the women did the household work. But it was totally unlike the work we do in our own homes today in the industrial west: all the work was *social* work. All the women of the household did the work together, so it went very fast and was cheery. It was never, ever a young mom stuck at home all day with just little kids to look after, losing her mind trying to keep the house clean by herself while the kids dump 8 million legos on the floor. That's not a thing. Little kids, when not nursing, can be foisted off on any girlchild older than about 8 so that the women can get real work done. And there are very few toys. The women have a whole host of little cottage industries going on, often *with other women*. The women run the marketplace-- they are the ones running 98% of the little stalls and shops, they are the butchers and poultry-sellers and fishmongers and vegetable dealers. The husband goes out on the fishing boats, or farms the squid, or leases the fields and grows crops-- and more often than not the wife is the one who handles the cash transactions involved in selling what he grows/catches. For the most part, the work they do isn't lonely, isolating drudgery, which is what everybody hates about housework these days. There's nothing social possible about using a washer and dryer. Not so when we all gather round the tubs and scrub clothes together. Vacuum cleaners? Can't even hear yourself think, much less converse. But when everyone grabs her whisk broom and sweeps the house at the start of the day... that's when the day gets planned.

[causticus]

Great points. The pre-industrial household was (and still is in some places, as you point out) a lot more nuanced and interesting than most people think. The atomized nuclear family is a product of modernity. People today who get all their information from pop culture and government indoctrination schools just assume that was the only kind of family that ever existed and thus women being "stuck" at home must have been some grave injustice or something. When in fact, its was so often the elder woman who ran the household and had plenty of help and company. Good mention too about kids actually earning their keep around the house. Compare that to today's spoiled little brats who aren't expected to lift a finger until they're about 24-25, not to mention the totally infantilized state that teenagers have been reduced to.

[jprussell]

Oh, I'm glad you brought this up! I had meant to mention that the industrial & financial economy has rendered children net economic burdens rather than net contributors. I had also known about the "sharing the load" in multi-generational households, but I hadn't thought about the social aspect - that's huge, and extremely helpful to add to my mental picture of non-industrial domestic and economic life.

[methylethyl]

Yeah, that was a thing that just kind of stunned me, traveling. I'd never thought about it before. I'd simply accepted that "normal" households have a wife/mom who does all the cooking and cleaning (and if he's really nice, husband/dad helps out once in a while). I've never known anyone who enjoyed that work-- it's dull, lonely, and mostly unappreciated. But in rural southeast asia, where I was visiting, it's so radically different in so many ways. I learned so much, but the biggest shocks were, how *little* work there seemed to be, and how quick, genial and sociable the work was. Our modern conveniences: hot water on demand, washers, dryers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, etc. do not save us any time or work: they *generate* unnecessary work! People who wash clothes by hand wear their clothes more than once between washes, they are more careful about the clothes-- from eating carefully to selecting fabrics for what will wear well, to just... not carelessly abusing them. They spot-clean, they're meticulous about hygiene (nobody uses deodorant or shaves), and they only have a few clothes to begin with.

Weirdly, just having a washing machine means you *must* have more clothes to use the machine efficiently. Otherwise you run out of clothes to wear before you can put together a full load. Ditto for dishwashers and dishes-- when you don't wash your own dishes, you carelessly use more of them, and you *need* more of them or you run out of cups when the washer's only half full. Sweeping is much faster than vacuuming. The only reason wall-to-wall carpet happened was because of affordable vacuum cleaners. The vacuum cleaners caused more work. And what of the refrigerator? Oh, now that means you only have to buy groceries once a week! Who needs milk delivery when you can get a whole gallon that will keep? But for people who live without that appliance (and I have done so for almost a year), getting something to cook for dinner is a pleasant daily outing, the food is better because it's fresh, and it's a little bit of social contact.

Cars... yeesh. Cars mean we can have everything zoned so there's never a place to buy food in walking distance. The mere presence of widely-affordable vehicles so altered our landscape, that in most places you almost can't buy groceries without a car. Everything's too far away. So while overseas, I lived without a fridge just fine, walked to the market or the store every day, chatted with the ladies there, and it was great! I can't do that back stateside. I'd have to get in the car and go to the store every day, and what a drag that would be!

Don't get me started about how much crap we all own, and how much harder, and more time-consuming, it makes cleaning our houses! Every time I go through my house and try to declutter all the junk people have strewn across every flat surface, I'm envious of my friends back in the village, who just didn't have enough stuff to make their house ever look cluttered. And didn't need it, either. We are dominated by our stuff, and it is suffocating us.

But that is how feminism happened in America. It was totally inevitable once we had the nuclear family, fridges, washing machines, cars, and carpets. Children shipped off to school, women sealed off from the community and from each other, doing each their work all alone, thankless work, pointless work, isolated work. Work that any trained monkey could do. Who could be happy that way?

It'll be an interesting adjustment, when all that starts to go away. The work will be harder, require more skill and knowledge... and it'll be more valued and less lonely. It is a weird sort of tradeoff. People in my great-grandmother's day (and she did laundry with her girls, with a boiling tub over a fire in the yard!) knew the value of a good, savvy, intelligent, shrewd woman running the household. It could determine how many of your children survived, and whether they went hungry or not. We've been so prosperous for so long that we haven't needed that kind of thrift, skill, and ingenuity. But I think we'll rediscover it.

[causticus]

For some reason I didn't see this comment until today (maybe the notification got buried?), thus I didn't get the chance to unscreen it until now. Which is a shame because there are so many great observations and insights here. Also, I think these points do a great job expressing addressing many of the concerns of a new commenter who just chimed in today; see the most recent comment at the bottom.

[next_migration]

The historian Judith Flanders, in The Making of Home, observed that in the twentieth-century, it became possible for the first time for most [white] male industrial workers to support a family on a single wage, and then, "labor-saving" conveniences were marketed - canned and frozen food, household appliances, pret-a-porter clothes, etc. - so that there was very little skilled labor to do at home. A century before, women might have been their husband's legal property but nobody disputed that they were working hard doing useful things at home. When everything was done for them by industry, they were left wasting their time on ridiculous dusting and vacuuming schedules; this provided an excuse to call them mentally inferior, because of the mindless activities they had been assigned, and treat them as economic parasites; and if such an existence hurt their soul, it could be squashed down to size with Valium.

In fact, I respect the domestic economy. In pre-industrial days both men and women usually worked at home, or in nature around their home, and taught their work to their kids. It would be a benefit in many ways if most of us could go back to doing that. In the meantime, I completely agree that it makes sense for many families to have a full-time homemaker if possible, of the old-fashioned seriously-skilled type. But she [or he!] has to have reason for confidence that she's not going to be either living under her husband's thumb or worse her whole life, or dumped and left to starve when the kids are grown and her chance of getting any decent job is long gone. If both husband and wife are subsistence farmers, their profound dependence on and need for one another is mutual; if husband is making $200,000 at the law firm or tech hub and wife is a subsistence homemaker, she will be largely at his mercy, and had better be very sure indeed of his character and commitment.

Re: Peak Oil

[nodrog]

Or, "The Time of Fire and Soldiers"

once the cheap oil is all gone. No more welfare state, and no more big business (or govt. agencies

AND no more 80% of current world population.  "Die-off" is the sterile, academic word for misery and death - cannibal starvation, murder, looting, freezing…  And as the above quote says, this will have specific, martial-law consequences in whatever society eventually emerges.  People like having a Terrible They whom they can blame, and abrasive arrogant smug feminists may find themselves specifically targeted by the New Order.

Re: Peak Oil

[causticus]

A "die-off" is not necessarily something that happens in one fell swoop. It can also be a "slow burn" that takes several centuries to play out. In the case of the latter scenario, it's not something immediately-noticeable in one lifetime beyond the general, "man, things seem to be really getting worse and worse by the year" observation.

[randomactsofkarmasc]

I'm not sure I even know what constitutes feminism or if I am a feminist or not. I was raised in a traditional family (father worked outside the home, mother maintained the home). My father thought it was important that I live independently before I got married, so I would never feel trapped (which, for his generation, was probably very forward thinking), but there were only two occupations really appropriate for women. (My sister is a nurse; I am a teacher.) (So illryria2001, I agree with you... I think women who work are much less likely to be gold-diggers than women who don't.)

In the not so distant past, women could be teachers, but only until they were married. In the even more recent past, it was difficult for women to have bank accounts in their name (without a male co-signer). If thinking that women should be allowed to work and have a bank account makes me a feminist, then I am definitely a feminist.

But saying that women want men for sperm is akin to saying that men want women for breeding (and their are cultures today that treat their women like chattel). There might be some women like that, but to lump all women (or all "feminists") into that description is intellectually lazy.

FWIW, growing up in a traditional family and then working as a teacher and seeing children who were being raised by traditional families (and children who were not), I came to the conclusion that if I were to have children, there would be a full-time stay-at-home parent. And when my husband and I had a child, that is what we did. But my career, though lower-paying than his, was much more conducive to the type of family life we wanted (pretty-much set schedule, time off for holidays, etc), so I worked outside the home and he was the homemaker. It worked well for us, but I agree with jrussell, people should have the option to choose what will work for them.

[violetcabra]

If I may:

Hear hear! Thank you for sharing this nuanced and understanding perspective. To my mind at least your comment here adds so much clarity to the discussion.

[causticus]

There's many competing/conflicting definitions (and "waves") of feminism, thus my decision to use the term "gender equality" ideology past the second paragraph instead of feminism beyond it being convenient clickbait in the title.

"But saying that women want men for sperm is akin to saying that men want women for breeding"

Let's dispose of the term "want" (as in conscious desire) for a moment and think about hindbrain-induced mating behaviors. Then there might be some truth to that statement, in an evolutionary sense.

[randomactsofkarmasc]

"All the wants, whims, pop/mass culture opinions, techno-superstitions, and ideological fads that come along with that arrangement will become totally irrelevant once industrial society can no longer sustain itself. "

I am happy to dispose of the term "want"; I was just piggy-backing on some of the previously used vocabulary.

If we want to think about hindbrain-induced mating behaviors, I think it would be more appropriate to say that women want men to be providers (protection, territory/home), not just sperm donors.

(But if you want to read a fun evolution and modern society mash-up, I suggest "Survival of the Prettiest." I read it ages ago, but it was quite interesting to see the evolutionary basis for standards of attractiveness. How can society consider both Marilyn Monroe and Twiggy attractive, when they seem to have such different bodies? All about the waist/hip ratio, which relates to child-birth capability...)

[causticus]

I would say human evolution trends more toward the Marilyn Monroe type of attractiveness. Whereas the fashion industry favors Twigggy's figure, for obvious reasons. Yeah, it's quite sad how countless women's lives have been ruined through decades of relentless advertising/marketing for the Twiggy ideal, which has gaslighted too many into thinking "stick skinny" is the body type most men prefer. Which of course isn't true at all. Yeah some guys like skinny girls, but I'd say most of us men prefer at least some thickness (not a slight at all to those women who are naturally skinny). And we're wayyyyyy less picky than Hollywood propaganda might suggest.

Human evolution itself is quite a harsh mistress when measured up against the edifice of social constructs our various cultures have erected in an attempt to tame the beast that is our **hindbrain** sexual impulses.

What 100,000+ years of human evolution has to say is broadly,
1. Women **want** the highest status (or most brazen) man of the group to father their children. And once those children are born, a provider to stick around. Note these are not necessarily going to be the same men.

2. Men **want** to run around boinking everything vaguely-female that moves.

Now when getting into the game of trying to maintain a civilized society, both of those above impulses can be incredibly destabilizing and destructive to a cohesive social order. That's why things like marriage and courtship rules were invented. Marriage is the ultimate social construct, especially monogamous marriage. **Nature** is constantly fighting this walled garden we've erected. Think of the gods as representing the kind of order that upholds and maintains the walled garden and its rules, whereas the giants/titans are those impulses always trying to break through and pillage the settlement. Problem is, like the gods, humans are a hybrid of gods and giants. As much as Zeus stands for civilization, he still has his bouts of running amok and boinking everything that moves...much to Hera's ire. This is also a good lesson on why it's so foolish to banish (or totally demonize) the giants from our mythologies. Jung would have a lot to say on that sort of suppression of the less-than-flattering aspects of human nature.

[methylethyl]

I think it's at least possible that even when women-competing-with-men-in-the-workplace is a thing of the past because gendered work has reasserted itself... we might still be able to hang on to nice things like independent land-ownership, controlling one's own finances, and being able to get an education. America in particular has a solid history of single women making contributions to the culture and community as writers, teachers, and business-owners. That stuff existed before the industrial revolution, and I see no reason it would necessarily go away after. Those women were the exception, not the rule, but they existed. It was not impossible to carve out an independent life.

[causticus]

This is the future I hope to see too.

[nodrog]

Or, as it was said long while back:

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons…

James Tiptree Jr.,

"The Women Men Don't See"

[next_migration]

The many traditional societies that did not treat women as men's property also had sex roles in work, not because women are all too frail to do real hard work (evidence to the contrary is everywhere) but because some tasks can't be done while heavily pregnant or supervising a nursing two-year-old. The fact that girls were steered away from those tasks proves not that women's productive labor was inconsistent with childbearing, but that it was essential. A family couldn't survive if the mother went on extended "maternity leaves" for each child; she had to be able to keep working while caring for infants (frequently producing most of the family's calories), so she had to specialize in tasks more consistent with that - which could include anything from foraging over long distances to weaving to running brewpubs.

I'd like to know what sort of future you or Mr. Martin envision in which women will lack work that is respected as such. Is the vision of a dark age so deep that all men are employed as peasants or murderers, in which case the employment of all women as housewives/breeders will be no worse? Or is it of a late medieval/early modern-like society in which a talented boy will still have some hope of becoming a doctor, merchant, teacher, writer or artist, while his sister can only be a wife/breeder? Jobs using intelligence, like most skilled handicrafts, are largely compatible with parenthood, and the lie that women lack the talent for either has been wholly debunked. This scenario would require a Christian Taliban to come in and ban women from all paid jobs or good jobs, then restrict girls' schooling so future generations would never discover their talents.

For context, Mr. Martin also recently posted on Ecosophia an explicit call for the mass slaughter of gay people, making me suspect that the latter scenario is exactly what he has in mind. Does he think Western women would submit? It would require the complicity of more men than the Proud Boy types to enforce it; does he think average Western men these days want it? Many are now accustomed to relationships in which both parties are there voluntarily, love each other, and are close if not best friends. Those men appreciate their wives' and sisters' abilities, and don't want them to be forced into being disgruntled "dependents" confined to homes where they work without getting credit for it.

As for fertility and "replacement rates", I regard this as a non-problem. The planet can't support eight billion people for long. With the impending loss of carrying capacity in large regions, can the US landmass support 340 million people indefinitely? Certainly not with the per-acre productivity one would expect in a dark age, if one predicts that. This means that the population must eventually decline. To the extent that that can happen by people having small families, rather than by women wearing out their bodies producing many children who then die of disease and famine, I think it is a good thing. The time may come when the population is seen as undesirably small and growth is valued - if so, it will be valued by both sexes - but that time is a long way off.

[causticus]

1. I think a major issue here is that the word "work" has been redefined in the modern age as only referring to income-earning work away from the home (though this has changed a bit with remote/telework, though it's still the act of doing work for an outside party). When in fact, in pre-industrial societies, at least half of all actual work was done in and around the home. Women have always been half the equation in the world of work. In the wealthier strata of society, when there was quite a lot of wealth and property to manage, it was often the wife who performed the role as manager. In a sense, women were the original "managerial class" (and I say this here without the usual pejorative flavoring). Secondly most moderns have forgotten what the "family" is historically. Hint: it's not the atomized nuclear family most of us here in the industrial west take for granted today. The Home usually to be a lot more populated than it is today.

2. I can't speak for Mr. Martin or whatever his predictions of the future might be. Me? Of course I cannot predict the future, nor do I have specific "wants" about how the future might unfold, beyond the yearning for religion (and by that, culture) to once again become more archetypally-balanced and positive toward nature. What I can do though (and anyone else interested can do as well) is study an assortment of pre-industrial cultures of historical significance (not just western ones) and see how they lived with limited energy resources and dependence on the land of small locales. I sure hope it's not the "dark age" societies that will inform on what might happen; such a scenario would be grim for both women and men. Preserving some semblance of civilization and workable "appropriate technology" in a post-oil context might be nice.

3. On that last bit,

The planet can't support eight billion people for long.

No argument from me here, though I do have to agree with the quoted snippet in my OP which states the obvious: that the future belongs to whomever ends up procreating the most. Having said that, I think there will be a steep drop-off in population one way or another, even if it takes centuries and is not immediately-noticeable within anyone's individual lifetime. Taking the overpopulation and environmental-despoliation issues into account, it becomes more than apparent that there is no immediate political solution to any of this, if we're to go by whatever nonsense the sad inventory of currently-fashionable political ideologies have to say on these matters, whether it's Woke Progressivism or MAGA Populism, Corporate (Neo)Liberalism, or Neoconservatism, or some permutation of those.

[next_migration]

I suspect I could find much more agreement with you than with Mr. Martin. If we reverted to a state in which half the population had to be employed in farming without powered machinery, then certainly farm families would revert to a form of labor organization in which the husband managed the heavy livestock, went out repairing fences, etc., while the wife kept the chickens, weeded and cooked the vegetables, etc. Plowing with a team of oxen wouldn't go well with a toddler underfoot. It doesn't follow from that that they must revert to a condition in which the husband is the wife's lord and master, is pretended to be more intelligent and moral than she, and will have sole control of their cash income and life decisions.

It appears that is the state that Mr. Martin prefers, but perhaps not you. How is "feminism" to be defined? If feminism means a belief that there should be no gender differences in activities, so that 50% of the 'plowpeople' ought to be women, yes, that kind of feminism wouldn't last long. My husband preferred to define feminism as "the radical notion that women are people." Everyone can be given the status of personhood, as in Native American tribes with influential women, and their work valued (as you point out by highlighting the fact that a couple engaged in subsistence labor were both understood to be working), while it is recognized that not every person can or should contribute in identical ways.

It so happens that I was always too weak to think of doing most traditional "men's work", but smart enough to be very good at intellectual labor. It was feminism that gave me the freedom to attend college, be hired for a job requiring education, and write (under my own name yet), which women in more patriarchal centuries rarely or never had. Oh, yes, and the freedom to vote and own property. That sort of feminism, I am vehemently unwilling to lose, and see no reason why the decline of industry means that I should.

[causticus]

1. This is a fascinating discussion and I thank you much for the thoughtful critique.

I'm in agreement about the type of shared labor organization of yore that might emerge when post-industrial conditions become a thing.

It doesn't follow from that that they must revert to a condition in which the husband is the wife's lord and master, is pretended to be more intelligent and moral than she, and will have sole control of their cash income and life decisions.

My best guess on why that type of patriarchy was so commonplace in the past,

(a) has to do with the same reason that elective monarchies so often end up turning into hereditary monarchies. If a civil war erupts every time a king dies and half the country is left in ruin, it becomes very logical to observant people that having a means of passing down rights of succession that doesn't involve endless debate, intrigue, and bloodshed, might prove to be a safer and more expedient method. Even if this means the son of the king is a complete idiot or is morally depraved. Of course there were notable exceptions to this rule (like perhaps the Celtic Druidic societies where elective kingship held on for a long time), but I digress. Now on the level of the individual household, anyone who has experienced unresolvable arguments between husband and wife knows how "hellish" that situation can be, and potentially devastating to the whole household and family. Thus the expediency issue comes into play again; if one party de jure has the final say, then crippling stalemates can be avoided and everyone can move on with the next round of business. There's likely other factors involved here, but that would go way off on another tangent.

(b) what I like to call "hyper-patriarchy" is something I see as being the legacy of the Ages of Aries, which began around 2300 BCE, give or take a century or two. During that age things like Fire, Burnt Offerings, Blood Sacrifices, Horse-aided Warfare, Warfare in general, Metal-smithing, ect. were the main motifs. Warlike nomadic pastoralist tribes ended up conquering, assimilating and bludgeoning the snot out of most other peoples. Under this new social order we started to see the role/position of women denigrated and in some cases women being treated like chattel slaves. This became as far cry from the earlier Age of Taurus societies, where men were officially in charge (probably for the reasons stated in the above point) but women were generally had a lot more rights and were seen as being just as valuable as men. Aries social arrangements carried over into the next Age, Pisces, though with some modifications. How things will shape up in today's "New Age," Aquarius is anyone's best guess, though this age does seem to involve traits like idiosyncrasy and the tolerance of differentiation, which seems like something that doesn't play well for extreme conformism and people being boxed into rigid roles and expectations.

2. Defining "feminism" is something that might take a 30,000+ word dissertation to fully flesh out. As there have been different versions/waves of it, each of them asserting very different ideas. So we're talking then about feminism in the plural form.

My husband preferred to define feminism as "the radical notion that women are people."

Hah, I like to call that the "Motte and Bailey" re-definition of terms for the sake of momentary convenience. It's the same gimmick the believers and proponents of various ideologies use to make their favored ideology sound more palatable to the average person. Just like how some Socialists might utter, "Y'know, Socialism is simply the idea that workers are people too!!" (When in fact, we know it's much more than that!!!) Instead, I like to judge ideologies by what the well-known activists and public intellectuals who self-identify as the label-in-question have to say, and what their goals and aims of being involving in ___ism happen to be. So back to the idea of feminism in the plural form. One might ask how the feminism of Annie Bessant differs from the feminism of Andrea Dworkin. And how either of those feminisms differ from the feminism of Camille Paglia. Or the feminism of Anita Saarkesian. You get the general idea here.

It so happens that I was always too weak to think of doing most traditional "men's work", but smart enough to be very good at intellectual labor. It was feminism that gave me the freedom to attend college, be hired for a job requiring education, and write (under my own name yet), which women in more patriarchal centuries rarely or never had. Oh, yes, and the freedom to vote and own property. That sort of feminism, I am vehemently unwilling to lose, and see no reason why the decline of industry means that I should.

3. I would argue that it was mostly the industrial revolution and its myriad labor-saving technologies, conveniences, and massive expansion of bureaucratic/managerial office work, that did away with most excuses for excluding women from non-brawny jobs. That, and Corporate America's push to depress wages across the board (as I talked about in some comments above) by flooding the workplace with a ton of additional labor that hadn't been there before (Big Business must have learned from WWII that women could do all sorts of jobs in a satisfactory manner). Sure, the early waves of feminism helped speed the process along, but I think most of the credit here goes to cheap fossil fuels and its technologies. If none of that happened, most women would still be working on their home farmsteads.

[next_migration]

That's an interesting analysis. Gerda Lerner's history of patriarchy noted that it began well before monotheism, though reached its ultimate heights there, and what you define as the Age of Aries might have been the rough starting point; I don't remember.

If it were not for fossil fuel, most women would still be working on home farmsteads, but so would most men. At the beginning of the 20th century, a quarter of the U.S. population farmed. But prior societies without fossil fuels allowed some people to specialize in arts, sciences, the professions, etc., and I presume future societies will as well. When "people" in that context means males only, the system has been so structured as to deprive women of the chance to exercise their talents. That is bad for those women, of course, but it is also bad for society; the more talented people are cut off from training by their sex, race, class, religion, or whatever, the less productivity there will be. It can't be true that only unpaid labor or only low-status paid labor (e.g., nurse vs. doctor, teacher vs. prof, prostitute vs. senator) is compatible with motherhood - and, of course, not all women will or can be mothers.

Certainly in the future the idea that "everyone should go to college" is going to sink like the Titanic. I will be satisfied if we do not fall back into the idea that even mediocre males merit education and leisure time to utilize it, while female geniuses exist to produce smart male babies.

As for the definition of "feminism", my husband certainly didn't intend his usage as a "gimmick." Neither of us spent any time reading the authors you name, so he wouldn't have been able to say which, if any, named category of theoretical, academic feminist thought he approved of. He simply believed that men should treat women as equals. He loved me for my intelligence and was glad to see me making use of it. That's all. I too do not want to make any more philosophical assertions.

[causticus]

Right, I doubt he himself intended that; rather he was (in good faith) repeating a "feelgood" meme that someone not-so-intellectually-honest originally came up with. The aforementioned "gimmick" is a well-worn rhetorical technique that has been employed by countless missionaries of aggressive faiths (and in the modern sense, aggressive secular ideologies) to present their doctrines as something palatable or reasonable to the people they are attempting to convert, when in fact the missionary is most certainly NOT being transparent about what they are pushing on the innocent person; they are especially not disclosing the entire ideological package and putting it all on the table to be examined objectively.

"Hey there kind sir, I'll have you know that _____ism nothing more than embracing love and light and treating your neighbor nicely. If you agree with that then you are a good _____ist just like me!"

Over the many millennia even the best of us have been fooled by the offerings of sophists, demagogues, and snake oil salesmen.

Of course I think we would both firmly agree that any temperate-minded and reasonable person today would agree that women should have the same civil rights as men. That alone doesn't make one a "feminist" in an ideological sense.

My general rule is to beware of all ___isms (of any and all stripes) and to resist bending the knee to any ideological banner or rallying cry. In my experience, any ideological package tends to be a mix of reasonable-sounding ideas and poison pills.

[next_migration]

Then I am not sure if I am a feminist in an ideological sense. While very strongly favoring equal rights, opportunities, and social respect for women, I'm not attached to any specific ideological framework, e.g., TERF vs non-TE radical feminism vs. non-radical, or whatever. Academic books presenting "theoretical frameworks" for practical or social issues bore me and I'm busy, so I don't read them and really don't know what the feminist theory options are. And I admit that some activists of whatever option really are a pain in the tail when they start criticizing harmless normal social behavior.

On the other hand, while you and I agree that women should have equal civil rights, there are others - like those incels who think it should be legal to rape women appearing in public, or the Dominionists who think women should be stripped of the franchise, or the Taliban who would throw them out of their jobs and classrooms - who disagree. Those men would call me a feminist, as a term of abuse, for disagreeing, but by their definition, most of the American public would be feminists. So should I own it and call myself a feminist, or deny it and let them think I'm admitting I should not have rights?

It seems like there is plenty of room for unnecessary conflict when "feminist" is used as a "cold prickly" vs. "warm fuzzy" word (as JMG has put it) to fight over, but some people are using "feminist" to mean "humorless language-policer who thinks everyone should call their babies 'they/them' or sign consent forms every time they kiss their boyfriend" and others mean "woman who wants to have a job and vote and not get beaten regularly or forced to have C-sections." Probably from the way I phrase that, you can tell that I feel a bit negative about the former and positive about the latter, but there are still too many people (usually but not always men) who feel cold-prickly about the latter definition and others (usually but not always women) who feel warm-fuzzy about the former. If I don't know which you are cold-pricklying about, it's easy for me to bristle up and do my threatened-porcupine act when it may not really be needed.

[causticus]

Sorry for the late reply (which will probably be my last one on this topic).

1. Yeah it sounds like you're simply a proponent of civil rights; one without all sorts of byzantine ideological strings attached. I'd gladly take up that banner too.

2. These are fringe ideas and ones that do not currently hold much of any (if at all) institutional power here in the industrialized West (unlike the great power "progressives" currently enjoy within our institutions). Of course you will find people on the internet presenting themselves as adherents of various "retrograde" ideas, whether unironically or just to troll and get a rise out of the hyper-sensitive. Like with wokesters, I find it best to just ignore and not engage with those people, and if they've intruded into your own online spaces, just to block/ban them from your feeds (or any forum or chat you happen to moderate) if they present those ideas in an antagonistic or antisocial manner. Otherwise if you want to get a quip or two in, I'd say sure call yourself a "feminist" just to get them to reveal their chaotic inner states and then hopefully scamper off to their next target. But yeah, overall at the end of the day, it's just a word....or what JMG like to call "animal grunts we assign different meanings to."

3. Yes it was those "humorless language-policers" (also referred to as "Social Justice Warriors") who hijacked nearly every left-wing social cause starting with the downfall of the Occupy Wall St. movement. Though of course those tendencies had already been lurking under the hood for decades and the SJW "usurpers" (in my view) were merely accelerating the base ideas each to their logical conclusion. Since I started having unfortunate encounters with these raving SJW fanatics, I've come to understand that all leftism is rife with totalitarian psychological elements; leftists never seem to run out of applecarts to knock over. It's because of this that leftist movements always devolve into mass hysteria and the sort of purity-spiraling that ensues, and when left unchecked, the hysteria further devolves into mass killings. See: the historical records for many examples of this dynamic at play. Ultimately it takes a Cromwell, Napoleon, or Stalin to put this to a stop.

4. On the "warm fuzzy" vs. "cold prickly" reaction that certain words elicit among different types of people, see again the "animal grunt" quip above. I think it's clear that most human language produces knee-jerk emotional reactions rather than something approaching clear symbolic or logical communication. Because of this, I see the willful usage of language as being a sort of magic art, with the "magicians" here being those skilled in rhetoric, persuasion, and in our modern age, advertising and marketing.

[methylethyl]

I see it more like the way my great-grandmother managed during the Great Depression. They were poor even *before* the depression. I used to quiz my great-aunts about it, because it was fascinating to me. They all said they didn't notice the Depression, because you couldn't get any poorer than they were. So they just kept being poor is all.

My great-grandfather had a job as a part-time sheriff's deputy, and picked up odd gigs on the side whenever he could-- unloading banana boats (part of the pay was in bananas), driving a dump truck that wouldn't make left turns, working on WPA projects... until the older children started working, his income supported a very large family. They had eleven kids, none of them died or were malnourished, and all grew up to be decent law-abiding, productive members of the community. None of them attributed that to their dad (and I think he may have died before age 60). They talked about their mother like she could walk on water and heal the blind.

They lived for some time without plumbing in a tar-paper house. They made it through because my great-grandmother was a wizard at making ends meet-- a truly amazing woman. She sewed everybody's clothes and quilts, raised chickens, kept a huge kitchen garden, raised hogs and kept a milk-cow (they never considered themselves farmers-- they were homesteading). She shot ducks and possum for the table, fished, gigged frogs, and probably cooked the occasional snake. If the boys brought down a squirrel with a slingshot, it went into the stewpot. Everybody helped, and mother was the project-manager who made it all work, the nurse/EMT who kept them alive (successfully nursed a five-year-old through a snakebite that turned his whole arm black), and the moral backbone that kept them all on the straight and narrow. She baked bread, made pickles, butchered poultry, and grew sweet potatoes, collards, and corn.

I think a resource-poor future could look a lot like that past. Her work was far, far, from unappreciated. Everybody in the family knew they couldn't have survived without her. She didn't just keep them alive, she gave them *dignity* in it. You could not say the "P" word around her. She would say they were not poor, because "poor" is a state of mind, and if you worked hard, learned, stayed honest, and did right by your kin and your neighbors, you could not, ever, be truly poor. God helps those who help themselves ;)

She lived into her seventies, and spent her old age in a comfortable house with a huge garden and stocked fish ponds-- out of all the work she'd done over the years, the garden and the fishing were what she truly enjoyed, so she kept those. Her widowed eldest daughter and bachelor son moved in with her and took care of her, the house, and the property (while working their own careers) until her death. She was surrounded by devoted children and adoring grandchildren, and while I never had the privilege of meeting her (died before my time), she's something of a legend, with probably well over a hundred current living descendants, who all grew up hearing stories about her and the old homestead.

FWIW, whether effective contraception is available in our future or not, I don't think it'll be a case of smaller families. I think population will shrink, but we'll see a lot more people just not having kids at all (this used to be a fairly normal thing, particularly for men-- there were a lot of bachelor uncles, sailors, and single men who worked fish camps, logging camps, mining claims, etc), and some small subset of people like great-grandmother, who have quite a lot of surviving children. And probably also a fair number of families with a lot of not-surviving children :( Child mortality is the historic/global norm, and I expect it'll make a roaring comeback, along with TB, cholera, malnutrition, and a lot of other things "cured" by modern affluence.

[next_migration]

What a wonderful legacy!

I think there is reason to hope that public health will not sink back to the depths of the past, provided that there's not a Pol Pot-style assault on knowledge and literacy. Part of our protection from waterborne and foodborne diseases, malnutrition, etc. comes from fossil-fueled infrastructure, but part comes from better knowledge of the causes of disease. We understand why polishing rice or using corn without nixtamalization caused deficiency diseases, so if we're forced to make one of those grains the center of our diet, we can insist that it be processed properly. We know that dangerous microbes can live in water, so we can find cheap means of treating drinking water to reduce its pathogen load.