The end of sisterhood?

For the first time in history, women in developed societies can take up any occupation or career they please. This has brought enormous benefits. But it has also had some less positive consequences—the death of sisterhood, a decline in female altruism and growing disincentives to bear children. So argues Professor Alison Wolf in her cover story for the April 2006 issue of Prospect magazine. Here's an extract from her article, Working girls:

Women used to enter the elite as daughters, mothers and wives. Now they do so as individuals.

This marks a rupture in human history. It is one that has brought enormous benefits to many people, and to many women in particular. But its repercussions are not all positive, either for society as a whole, or for all women. We are no more likely to return to the old patterns than we are to subsistence agriculture, so we need to understand what the new female labour market means for all our lives.

Three consequences get far less attention than they deserve. The first is the death of sisterhood: an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men.

The second is the erosion of "female altruism," the service ethos which has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies - particularly in the education of their young, and the care of their old and sick.

The third is the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore, sometimes wilfully, the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children.

Comments

[Lord]

And whether they will be happy with a house-husband. Giving up the desire to be taken care of can be hard medicine.

[cb]

The lack of children has demographic implications that are addressed in the following article:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3376

[gordon]

And spare a thought for the girls who still do want most of all to be wives and mothers. Their parents and peers look down on them and their self-respect is in tatters.

[Name]

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