Prometheus 6

Men, of course, were hit hard by the recession and weak recovery, too; in fact, as Louis Uchitelle of the Times reported earlier this week, the workforce participation rates of men aged 25 through 54 have dropped from 96 percent in 1953 to 86.4 percent today.

But when men in their prime working years drop out of the workforce we don’t say they’ve gone home to be with their kids.

We say they’re unemployed. [P6: Busted politicians not withstanding...]

The Other Home Equity Crisis

In the early 1990s, she was called the “New Traditionalist.”

In the early 2000s, she led the charge of the “Opt-Out Revolution.” Educated and affluent, happily employed full-time with the care of her kids, she was said to be the standard-bearer for a generation that had discovered, after decades of blindly Seeking It All, that the road to true happiness lay in throwing in the towel and heading home.

It has happened like clockwork. In the past two economic downturns, as job losses have forced women out of the workplace, a sort of angel has appeared to guide their way and re-label their unfortunate circumstances as virtuous “choice.”

Economists, sociologists and other academics who rigorously track workplace trends and work-life issues have been saying for years that this self-realized creature with her new, post-feminist home and hearth priorities, is a chimera.

There has been no meaningful large-scale generational trend toward stay-at-home motherhood, they say. While women’s workforce participation did start to decline in 2000, interrupting decades of continual progress, this wasn’t because women chose joyfully to go home. Women left the workforce when the cost of child care ate up their entire after-tax salaries, or when family-unfriendly workplaces pushed them out. Or when, like women without children or men with and without children, they were laid off in a bad economy.

But these naysaying voices have been largely shouting in the wind. No one has really wanted to hear that the much-vaunted new “choices” weren’t really choices at all. No one’s been scouring obscure academic journals for the real skinny on women’s progress. No one’s been too eager to embrace grim facts over more-glorious fictions.

But now the facts have gotten so very grim that no one can believably gussy them up anymore.