Why would millennial men prefer stay-at-home wives? Race and feminism
THE LIBERAL imagination tends to assume not only that history unfolds in a progressive direction but also that progressivism’s disparate values and groups need not contradict one another.
New research indicates that young millennials, who many assumed would be torch bearers for a more progressive approach to family life, actually take a more traditional view of family arrangements than Generation Xers and baby boomers when they were young adults. After embracing increasingly feminist family attitudes from the 1970s to the 1990s, young adults are more likely to embrace traditional attitudes about male breadwinning, female homemaking and male authority in the home, according to a new report from sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter. They note that although millennials have not backed off their support for opportunities for working women, they are less likely to embrace egalitarianism at home compared with young adults two decades ago. In other words, the gender revolution in attitudes among young adults has stalled out or even shifted course.
This represents an important change in the evolution of gender attitudes. From the 1970s to the 1990s, as baby boomers and Xers came of age, a growing share of young adults ages 18 to 25 rejected the view that it is “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” But since the mid-1990s, support for this traditional view has surprisingly climbed among young men and women, as historian Stephanie Coontz recently noted in the New York Times.
In the 2010s, 28 per cent of young adults agreed with this view, compared with 22 per cent in the 1990s, according to the General Social Survey (GSS). Part of the reason that today’s young adults are less likely to hold egalitarian gender attitudes regarding the division of family life is that minorities, especially Hispanics, make up a growing share of American millennials. In 1980, only seven per cent of young adults ages 18 to 25 were Hispanic; today, 22 per cent are. That matters, because young Hispanics (especially young Hispanic men, who prefer traditional family arrangements at higher percentages than Hispanic women) are more likely to embrace a traditional division of family and work responsibilities than other young adults. Here, Hispanic families’ long- standing embrace of male breadwinning and female homemaking stands in tension with American progressivism’s commitment to gender equality in the home. Likewise, younger African Americans hold relatively more traditional gender attitudes than do white millennials. Our findings are consistent with other research indicating that minority men are more likely to hold somewhat more traditional gender attitudes about domestic life. Here again, then, we have evidence that progressivism’s disparate coalition members are not always on board with all of the goals of the movement.
But the gender attitudinal reversal that appeared in the 1990s is not only about the shifting character of America’s racial and ethnic fabric. It also seems to be fuelled by the rise of choice feminism, a style of feminism that emphasises women’s right to choose the lives they want without judgement.
According to Cotter and colleagues, the increasing popularity of intensive mothering in the 1990s, frustrations over the stresses associated with balancing work and family, and a media and pop culture backlash to feminism in the 1990s - think of the “you can’t have it all” meme from the era - made 1970s- style feminism, with its insistence on moms combining full-time work and family life, less appealing to a growing minority of young adults.
Instead, a growing number of young women (and men) embraced a “choice feminism” that suggested that it was fine for mothers to be stay-at-home mothers or part-time workers, so long as they decided to pursue this path of their own choice. — Washington Post