Why Marriage Was Allowed To Collapse (2)

No-one foresaw in 1969 that seventy per cent of divorces would be filed by women: they thought it would be men wanting to get away from their wives. (This was a world before feminism.) When it's the man filing, everything is easy: he can with some justice be asked to pay for the upkeep of his ex-wife, since he's leaving her at his convenience. He has no right to suppose the taxpayer will or should take her on. When it's the woman filing a no-fault divorce, you can't ask the man to pay for her upkeep: even a Family Court judge might blanche at that, and she becomes a welfare burden. But if she gets the children some alimony can be baked into the child support. The Family Court has to award custody to the woman so that continued payments by the husband to a woman who doesn't want to be associated with him look even vaguely just.

In 1969, no-one understood how that Social Services and Local Government would become the garbage can where national politicians would throw publicly-visible "people issues", nor that both would be given powers far beyond the competence of their employees. I don't think Family Law was hi-jacked by feminists, but I do think that social services houses misandrists and not a few bullies who exploit the ambiguities in the law, the closed-hearing process of Family Courts, and the alleged lesser minds who practice Family Law. MRA stories sound like what happens when a weakling meets a bully, and I suspect it takes a fairly unholy alliance of wife, social worker and lawyer to really work the voodoo. 

The legislators didn't foresee the demand for female labour that was about to be created by a change to process-oriented service industry jobs that would form much of the post-industrial economy. They certainly didn't foresee that women would find it easier to get jobs and have a higher probability of keeping them. They didn't understand just how many women didn't really want to be married and would be quite happy being wage slaves or living off a mixture of welfare, child support and alimony. Nobody knew that almost half the female population are happy to fool around in their twenties and early thirties and then settle down on their own with or without cats or children (the noises about "can't find a good man" from post-Wall women are self-deceiving camouflage on their part: what they mean is that they can't get laid at will like they used to be able to). 

Nor did anyone foresee that the colossal incompetence and complacency of Western industrial management would lose millions of well-paid skilled jobs first to the Far East, then to India, and that management's response would be to join 'em, not beat 'em. Post-modern Capitalism (born 4th May 1979) created a pervasive sense of insecurity and contingency about employment, stopped training its new hires and hollowed out its business practices so that, in fact, there is very little to train new hires to know or do. As a result, a woman really does need a man like a fish needs a bicycle - if she wants to work. Add to this a changing attitude amongst men to cooking, personal care and housework, and it turns out that a man needs a woman like an eagle needs an anchor. By 1990 it is not obvious that either side needs the other except for sex and companionship - both of which have fairly short half-lives.

Post-modern Capitalism could not have developed as it did if women had still expected to leave the workforce to raise children for maybe twelve years, so that men needed to earn enough to support a wife and two children. The slow erosion in the inflation-adjusted value of working men's salaries since the mid-1970's would have been stopped by Trades Unions and the social consensus that said the role of women was child-raising. But once women work, and once having children becomes optional that resistance vanishes: the Unions have no support for any action to preserve male salaries. Two-income households, once the preserve of the industrial working class and agricultural labourers, became the standard way of life for the "middle classes". (What do you think all those "professional" thirty year-olds in their flat/house shares are but multi-income households?)

(Continued in Part Three)